From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages

Interactions among the environment, humans and language are central to contemporary challenges. This study examines verbs used to encode weather events in Sinitic languages and proposes that kinesis—grounded in perceptible mass and speed, components of kinetic energy—accounts for correlations between meteorological events and linguistic encoding. Drawing on the view that kinesis underpins verb classes, the paper explains language variation and change: weather events with larger substances and/or faster processes tend to select high-transitivity action verbs. The account predicts typological variation between verbal and nominal weather constructions. An experiment with native Sinitic speakers corroborates correlations between perceived mass/speed and verb choice. Regional verb-selection exceptions align with regional meteorological patterns. Kinesis thus bridges physical weather events and their linguistic encoding, highlighting cognition’s role in transforming physical and sensory inputs into shared linguistic knowledge.

Chu-Ren Huang, Sicong Dong, Yike Yang, He Ren