Does the Thunder Roll? Mandarin Chinese Meteorological Expressions and Their Iconicity

Hoey, Thomas Van

doi:10.1163/23526416-00402003

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Further investigation is required to ascertain just how recognizable and depictive these three entries would be for modern-day Mandarin speakers. It is possible that the authors of these 20th century texts were emulating older literary styles, as Van Hoey [48] notes that historical forms of Chinese sound symbolic words are often considered literary rather than colloquial due to their association with classical Chinese. It is quite possible that some of the forms in Table 3 have lost their iconic properties and are now preserved as descriptive literary devices rather than depictive expressions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are tones in the expressive lexicon iconic? Evidence from three Chinese languages

Thompson

2018

PLoS ONE

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Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the suprasegmental information unexplored. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideophonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means. For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language, one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal bias. These results indicate that phonological systematicity at the prosodic level might play an important role in demarcating an iconic class of words. This cross-linguistic tendency towards high tone mappings may be derived from phonotactic strategies to facilitate prosodic foregrounding of iconic utterances as well as an embodiment of expressive voice and marked pitch use like that of Infant Directed Speech.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are tones in the expressive lexicon iconic? Evidence from three Chinese languages

Thompson

2018

PLoS ONE

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“…The second group of weather nouns, namely 露 lù 'dew' and 霜 shuāng 'frost', need to combine with verbs with downward meanings, such as 降 jiàng and 陨 yǔn in ( 1) and ( 2) below, to indicate their occurrence. 2 The last group, 雷 léi 'thunder' and 电/電 diàn 'lightning', are not found to convey any directional meanings.…”

Section: Evidence From Archaic Chinesementioning

confidence: 94%

Directionality and Momentum of Water in Weather: A Morphosemantic Study of Conceptualisation Based on Hantology

Dong

Yang

Huang

et al. 2020

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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We present in this paper a study of the conceptualisation of meteorological events involving water in Chinese based on Hantology, a SUMO-based ontology of Chinese orthography. Our comprehensive investigation of the morphosemantic behaviours of these weather words in both Mandarin and Sinitic languages reveals that they are predicted by the directionality and momentum of their formation and movement. We studied events involving water in both liquid and solid forms: such as rain, snow, hail, fog, dew and frost. They share the radical 雨, which can be linked to two SUMO nodes according to Hantology. This ontological bifurcation can be shown to bring about not only the diversity of direction expressions referring to these words for water, but also the differences of semantic features and PoS between them in Archaic Chinese. Moreover, the momentum of different water forms is proposed to be the physical basis for the differences of PoS, semantic features and node linking.

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“…The above methods for identifying ideophones are language-agnostic: they rely on the semiotics of depictive constructions and cross-linguistically attested properties of ideophonic lexical items to identify a lexical class of ideophones in a given language. Once such a class is identified, this will provide a view of relevant language-specific resources, for instance particular grammatical categories or morphosyntactic devices (Akita 2017;Park 2020;Van Hoey 2023). Ideophones can constitute a distinct grammatical category in the language (e.g.…”

Section: Collecting Ideophonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones

McLean,

Dingemanse

2024

Preprint

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As lexicalized depictions, ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics) differ fundamentally from other words both in the kinds of meanings they represent and the ways in which they represent them. This can make them difficult to capture using traditional methods for language description and documentation. We review some of the new and experimental techniques that have been used to elicit, describe, and analyse ideophones, and discuss how these can be used to address some of the unique challenges ideophones pose. They include stimulus-based elicitation; multimodal folk definitions; hybrid modes of analysis (combining images and text); and new ways of compiling and presenting multimodal ideophone corpora. We also review psycholinguistic methods for exploring the sensory properties of words and the organisation of the lexicon, such as sensory ratings and similarity judgment tasks, and discuss how these can contribute to our understanding of ideophone lexicons. Crucial to our approach is the combination of insights from multiple sources, the exploitation of polysemiotic resources (combining multiple modes of meaning making), and the integration of etic and emic perspectives. The discussion is structured around three key challenges: collecting ideophones, unravelling their slippery semantics, and representing them in ways that do justice to their special semiotic properties. The days when ideophones were just footnotes in grammars are long past. With more and more researchers working to document ideophones in languages around the world, and increasing interest in iconicity from across the language sciences, now is an excellent time to rethink the toolkit of documentary linguistics to make sure it can optimally deal with language in all its semiotic diversity.

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Does the Thunder Roll? Mandarin Chinese Meteorological Expressions and Their Iconicity

Cited by 9 publications

References 13 publications

Are tones in the expressive lexicon iconic? Evidence from three Chinese languages

Are tones in the expressive lexicon iconic? Evidence from three Chinese languages

Directionality and Momentum of Water in Weather: A Morphosemantic Study of Conceptualisation Based on Hantology

A multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones

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