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Map of distribution of frost expressions with high transitivity verbs and frost damage areas. The red line is the isogloss of frosting expressions using high transitivity verbs, the blue line borders the area with frost damage.
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Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challenges we face today. This study investigates the use of different verbs to encode various weather events in Sinitic languages, a language family spoken over a wide range of climates and with 3000 years of continuous textual documentation. We propose to s...
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... to our data in Tables 1, 56.1% of Sinitic languages use high transitivity verbs such as 打 dǎ 'to hit' to encode this weather event, while other languages using verbs with lower transitivity. Figure 3 shows the isogloss of transitive verb usage, as well as the area of frost damage. The area bordered in red represents the isogloss of the use of 打 dǎ HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00682-w ...
Citations
... In other words, people in warmer climates have lower communicative need to distinguish snow and ice. Recently, a series of interdisciplinary studies have looked into the use of verbs in weather expressions (Dong et al., 2020Huang et al., 2021). A hypothesis has been proposed by such studies that weather events with bigger weather substances and faster weather processes tend to select action verbs of high transitivity. ...
Lexically, 52.99% of the Tibeto-Burman languages, the non-Sinitic branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family, treat fog as something identical or similar to cloud, based on our database of 234 Tibeto-Burman varieties; there are three lexical relations of such fog-cloud similarity in Tibeto-Burman languages, namely cloud colexified with fog, cloud as a hypernym of fog, and cloud as a formative of fog. The rest of the Tibeto-Burman languages use semantically disconnected words to describe fog and cloud. The high proportion of fog-cloud similarity in Tibeto-Burman languages, compared with that of the non-Tibeto-Burman languages spoken alongside the Trans-Himalayan region (i.e., 10.80%, a result based on our database of 213 non-Tibeto-Burman varieties), has its historical reason, namely the relics of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. However, other than the phylogenetic factors, an underlying reason can be attributed to the environmental influence. The present findings indicate that fog-cloud similarity is more likely to happen at higher elevations, particularly between the range of 1000 m to 3000 m above sea level. After reviewing the meteorological features, it is found that the Tibeto-Burman region has ideal conditions for the formation of low cloud, namely with high humidity and through orographic uplift due to the mountainous environment. Since Tibeto-Burman speakers live in high elevations, low cloud, the dominant cloud of the region, may surround them or beneath their view. Therefore, they may find it difficult or not necessary to distinguish fog from low cloud. Our conclusion is also supported by the languages of other families and regions, such as the Daghestanian languages of the Caucasus region and the languages of the Central Andes. Moreover, the present findings agree with the theory of efficient communication. That is, languages displaying fog-cloud similarity are adaptive to higher elevations with less communicative need to distinguish between the two concepts by using completely different and unrelated linguistic forms; on the contrary, languages displaying fog-cloud divergence have stronger need to do so, resulting as well from their adaptation to the extra-linguistic environment. Finally, tropical climates, another possible predictor for fog-cloud similarity, are identified as a future research direction.
... Although Sinitic languages seem mostly homogeneous in morphosyntax, they do show internal typological variations [21][22][23][24][25]. A follow-up big-scale investigation on Sinitic varieties can provide a detailed pattern of distribution. ...
The genitive marker 的 li55 in Chongqing Mandarin can also function as a coordinating conjunction. This function develops from the usage of li55 to link numbers or quantities in calculations. Several restrictions are found on the coordinator li55, e.g., conjuncts must be nominal and shall be all the members of a definite set; li55 must be used between every two conjuncts and can only be used in informal registers. Similar coordinate function of genitive markers can also be found in other Sinitic languages while rarely seen in other language families, which merits further typological investigations.
... Linguistic encoding of weather, for example, has been shown to vary typologically. Huang et al. (2021) and Dong et al. (2021) showed that the variations in the use of different linguistic devices to encode kinesis in China correspond to the actual distribution of weather patterns in China based on the different kinetic energy of the weather events. Su et al. (2021) showed that historical and geographic variations in professional gender segregation in China can be mapped to the use (or lack) of gender modification of professional terms. ...
The present paper explores the synchronic variations and diachronic changes in political discourses in Hong Kong (HK) and in Mainland of People’s Republic of China (PRC). The relationship between lengths of linguistic constructs and their immediate constituents (including sentences and clauses, and clauses and words) are fitted using the function y = axb based on the Menzerath–Altmann (MA) law to capture the characteristics of language as self-organizing complex systems. We found that the two fitted parameters a and b, as distinctive characteristics of complex systems, can distinguish two regional variants of political speeches from HK and PRC over different periods in time. We also found that the same parameters can capture language changes between different periods of political speeches from the PRC. More specifically, we found that regional variations and historical changes show different degrees of salience at different constituency levels. In addition, we found compounding effects between historical change and regional variations. That is, the two regional variants of political speeches are closer to each other at the earliest diachronic period as compared with the latter two periods, as represented by the fitted parameters of the relationship between sentence and clause lengths. Our results provide strong support for the hypothesis for the MA Law capturing the characteristics of language as a complex self-organizing system, as the two fitted parameters account for the interaction of diachronic language change and synchronic variation.
... Most studies, within the framework of Eriksen et al. [1,2], investigated whether certain weather events are encoded as predicates or arguments in different languages. Huang et al. [3], in addition, showed that typological research on weather expressions can be expanded to the diversity of verbs that collocate with arguments carrying meteorological meanings, such as Mandarin 下 xià 'to fall' in 下雨 xiàyǔ 'to rain' and 起 qǐ 'to rise' in 起雾 qǐwù 'to fog'. This paper will look into such verbs in expressions indicating the occurrence of frost, henceforth frost verbs, in Sinitic languages and ancient Chinese. ...
... For such behaviour of frost verbs, Huang et al. [3] provided an account using mass and speed involved in a weather phenomenon: weather events with bigger weather substances and faster weather processes tend to select action verbs with high transitivity or high kinesis. Frost is heavier than fog and dew, and is thus inclined to be expressed by the action verb 打 dǎ 'to hit'. ...
... This usage and frame reflect the original meaning of 霜 shuāng: a substance to perish, and to make farming accomplished [5]. Also, the use of these transitive verbs is correlated with language speakers' experience and impact by meteorological events, the damage to crops or other plants by frost in this particular case, which can be predicted by the theory of Huang et al. [3], namely, weather events of high kinesis (big mass and/or fast speed) are correlated with verbs of high kinesis (transitive action verbs). Similarly, 打 dǎ 'to hit' is used as a transitive verb in many Sinitic languages to describe lightning strike [11], also a meteorological disaster, which further supports the claim. ...
The verbs indicating the occurrence of frost in Chinese have undergone a diachronic change. Ancient Chinese chiefly uses non-volitional verbs with downward movement meanings, while Sinitic languages widely adopt 打 dǎ ‘to hit’, an action verb with high transitivity. This modern usage develops from the transitive verb 打 dǎ ‘to hit’ denoting frost damage in ancient Chinese through conventionalization and semantic bleaching. Speakers of Chinese using this verb have experienced frost distinctively, which leads to the linguistic innovation. The geographical distribution of frost verbs and frost damage provides clues to this relation between weather and language.
... This way we can ensure that the generalizations reported earlier can be subsumed by our more comprehensive study with year-to-year change patterns. In terms of solving Galton's problem, we echo the approach proposed [19] for complex interactive systems. That is, we try to provide all corroborating evidence for the proposed account without attempting to establish a single logical causal relation. ...
... Following Labov [20], Leech [1] initiated the data driven approach to investigate the effect of social changes on language uses, focusing on the attitudinal expression of modal verbs. Taking advantage of the availability of a larger corpus, as well as the ubiquity of language big data, this paper joins the emergent trend of using linguistic evidence to identify environmental and societal changes [8,19,41,47]. In particular, this study leverages Halliday and Hasan's theory [31] of putting language uses in the social context, and thus we can clearly identify the different behaviors of high and low value modal verbs to societal changes and we were able to produce a theoretically felicitous account that reconciles the discrepancies of the two previous studies by a careful experimental design. ...
Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.
... Weather words in Sinitic languages (including Mandarin and traditionally termed Chinese dialects) have received much attention in recent years [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. These studies covered a wide range of meteorological phenomena in more than 200 Sinitic languages or dialects and offered accounts for various morphosemantic and grammatical behaviours of weather expressions. ...
Thunder and frost are said in Sinitic languages to be controlled by higher powers, or to simply occur by themselves, or even to cast severe damage on human society as agents. Such diverse linguistic behaviours and meanings pose challenges and add complexity to the ongoing debate on the unaccusativity of weather verbs. We present in this paper an investigation into various weather verbs in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages based on dictionaries of different languages and corpus data. By a set of diagnostics, cases of unaccusative, unergative and transitive weather verbs have been attested in Sinitic languages. The majority of weather verbs are alternatively unaccusative or unergative, depending on which event structures they are associated with. Specifically, the unaccusative behaviour is linked to the view of weather events as happenstances, in the cognitive processing mode of sequential scanning; the unergative behaviour is linked to the view of weather events as activities, in the cognitive processing mode of summary scanning.
... Second, it is not clear what linguistic features are effective cues for a language, such as Chinese, without grammatical genders. To solve Galton's problem, we follow the approach of (Huang et al., 2021). That is, we recognise that each important issue in the humanities and social sciences must be viewed in, and cannot be disassociated from, its sociocultural context. ...
... Given the complexity of all the issues the humanities is concerned with, it is necessary to integrate all available tools and knowledge from various disciplines and to form synergetic views, with a humanistic perspective and some speculations if needed. This is precisely the approach taken in a series of studies researching the interaction of meteorological events, people, and their languages (Huang et al., 2021). Similar approaches have been taken by various recent studies, such as the use of Google N-gram to study social developments and cultural/ linguistic variations by Juola (2013) and Li et al. (2020); the application of a linked data approach to cultural heritage material for the discovery of gender properties of (in particular, female) jazz artists by Pattuelli et al. (2017); and the machine learningbased analysis of large-scale newspaper data to uncover inconsistent coverage of female and male politicians as evidence of social gender bias (Leavy, 2018). ...
This paper proposes a textual analytics approach to the discovery of trends and variations in social development. Specifically, we have designed a linguistic index that measures the marked usage of gendered modifiers in the Chinese language; this predicts the degree of occupational gender segregation by identifying the unbalanced distribution of males and females across occupations. The effectiveness of the linguistic index in modelling occupational gender segregation was confirmed through survey responses from 244 participants, covering 63 occupations listed in the Holland Occupational Codes. The index was then applied to explore the trends and variations of gender equality in occupation, drawing on an extensive digital collection of materials published by the largest newspaper group in China for both longitudinal (from 1946 to 2018) and synchronic (from 31 provincial-level administrative divisions) data. This quantitative study shows that (1) the use of gendered language has weakened over time, indicating a decline in occupational gender stereotyping; (2) conservative genres have shown higher degrees of gendered language use; (3) culturally conservative, demographically stable, or geographically remote regions have higher degrees of gendered language use. These findings are discussed with consideration of historical, cultural, social, psychological, and geographical factors. While the existing literature on gendered language has been an important and useful tool for reading a text in the context of digital humanities, an innovative textual analytics approach, as shown in this paper, can prove to be a crucial indicator of historical trends and variations in social development.
... Most studies, within the framework of Eriksen et al. [1,2], investigated whether certain weather events are encoded as predicates or arguments in different languages. Huang et al. [3], in addition, showed that typological research on weather expressions can be expanded to the diversity of verbs that collocate with arguments carrying meteorological meanings, such as Mandarin 下 xià 'to fall' in 下雨 xiàyǔ 'to rain' and 起 qǐ 'to rise' in 起雾 qǐwù 'to fog'. This paper will look into such verbs in expressions indicating the occurrence of frost, henceforth frost verbs, in Sinitic languages and ancient Chinese. ...
... For such behaviour of frost verbs, Huang et al. [3] provided an account using mass and speed involved in a weather phenomenon: weather events with bigger weather substances and faster weather processes tend to select action verbs with high transitivity or high kinesis. Frost is heavier than fog and dew, and is thus inclined to be expressed by the action verb 打 dǎ 'to hit'. ...
... This usage and frame reflect the original meaning of 霜 shuāng: a substance to perish, and to make farming accomplished [5]. Also, the use of these transitive verbs is correlated with language speakers' experience and impact by meteorological events, the damage to crops or other plants by frost in this particular case, which can be predicted by the theory of Huang et al. [3], namely, weather events of high kinesis (big mass and/or fast speed) are correlated with verbs of high kinesis (transitive action verbs). Similarly, 打 dǎ 'to hit' is used as a transitive verb in many Sinitic languages to describe lightning strike [11], also a meteorological disaster, which further supports the claim. ...
The verbs indicating the occurrence of frost in Chinese has undergone a diachronic change. Ancient Chinese chiefly uses non-volitional verbs with downward movement meanings, while Sinitic languages widely adopt 打 dǎ ‘to hit’, an action verb with high transitivity. This modern usage develops from the transitive verb 打 dǎ ‘to hit’ denoting frost damage in ancient Chinese through conventionalization and semantic bleaching. Language speakers using this verb have experienced frost distinctively, which leads to the linguistic innovation. The geographical distribution of frost verbs and frost damage provides clues to this relation between weather and language.
... While the preference for non-directional expressions reverses the order. This contrast is likely related to the mass and state of the weather products: Suspended fog is light and more gas-like, dew is visibly liquid, and frost is solid and relatively heavy (see Huang et al., 2021, for more discussion). The results show that not only can fog, dew, and frost "fall" in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages, they even "fall" more than they "rise." ...
Why are fog, dew, and frost said to “fall” in some languages when they don’t in the physical world? We explore this seeming infelicity to study the nature of linguistic conceptualization. We focus on variations and changes of the morphosemantic behaviors of weather words in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages with an interdisciplinary approach to establish links between linguistic expressions and scientific facts. We propose that this use of directionality is the result of conventionalization of Chinese people’s inference from shared daily experience, and is well motivated in terms of a linguistic ontology that reflects a scientific account of natural phenomena. We further demonstrate that the semantically relevant orthography shared by Chinese speakers can be directly mapped to Hantology, a formal linguistic ontology based on Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). In this mapping, the radical 雨 yǔ “rain,” derived from the ideograph of “rain” to represent atmospheric water, provides crucial clues to the use of directional verbs and the parts of speech of weather words. Our findings also lend support to language-based reconstruction of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and lay foundation for TEK research in the Sinosphere.
... Our paper supports this line of modeling as we have shown that the life cycle of neologisms fits well within an epidemic model. Another new research approach has been recently proposed in [57] to correlate significant typological variations of weather words to meteorological patterns. The basic hypothesis is that the environmental impact, as measured by kinesis, would be reflected in the linguistic system of weather expressions [58]. ...
... Since China had many local gazetteers in different cities (地方志 di4fang1zhi4 "local gazetteers"), modeling the cycle of changes of symptomatic, preventative, or medicinal terms based on historical data of local gazetteers over a period of time and from different places in the same region, it may be possible to establish the model of the spread of major epidemics in a historical context. Either research direction can be enriched by correlational analysis with environmental changes, such as major weather events, based on language data analysis [57]. ...
This paper adopts models from epidemiology to account for the development and decline of neologisms based on internet usage. The research design focuses on the issue of whether a host-driven epidemic model is well-suited to explain human behavior regarding neologisms. We extracted the search frequency data from Google Trends that covers the ninety most influential Chinese neologisms from 2008-2016 and found that the majority of them possess a similar rapidly rising-decaying pattern. The epidemic model is utilized to fit the evolution of these internet-based neologisms. The epidemic model not only has good fitting performance to model the pattern of rapid growth, but also is able to predict the peak point in the neologism’s life cycle. This result underlines the role of human agents in the life cycle of neologisms and supports the macro-theory that the evolution of human languages mirrors the biological evolution of human beings.
