Does the Thunder Roll? Mandarin Chinese Meteorological Expressions and Their Iconicity
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From a typological perspective, Chinese meteorological expressions are argument-oriented. However, using a lexical semantic approach, based on corpus data as well as dictionaries and Chinese WordNet, a taxonomical lexical field can be established to further analyze the basic level items. Five main clusters of meteorological expressions are identified: precipitation, wind, thunder, sunshine and cloud. A comparison of these clusters with frames derived from the English FrameNet shows that Chinese has a narrower conception of weather phenomena than English. There is significant influence from the script on the linguistic system, at least in relation to meteorological expressions. It is shown that Chinese uses iconicity in its writing system where it is lacking in its phonology. A special case study are weather-related ideophones, where two strata are found: those that are phonologically and semantically motivated and receive iconic support from the writing system vs. those that do not receive this support.
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Does the Thunder Roll? Mandarin Chinese Meteorological Expressions and Their Iconicity
In: Cognitive SemanticsSearch for other papers by Thomas Van Hoey in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
From a typological perspective, Chinese meteorological expressions are argument-oriented. However, using a lexical semantic approach, based on corpus data as well as dictionaries and Chinese WordNet, a taxonomical lexical field can be established to further analyze the basic level items. Five main clusters of meteorological expressions are identified: precipitation, wind, thunder, sunshine and cloud. A comparison of these clusters with frames derived from the English FrameNet shows that Chinese has a narrower conception of weather phenomena than English. There is significant influence from the script on the linguistic system, at least in relation to meteorological expressions. It is shown that Chinese uses iconicity in its writing system where it is lacking in its phonology. A special case study are weather-related ideophones, where two strata are found: those that are phonologically and semantically motivated and receive iconic support from the writing system vs. those that do not receive this support.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1245 | 238 | 10 |
| Full Text Views | 254 | 7 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 80 | 8 | 3 |