The thunder rolls: Iconicity and ideophones in Chinese meteorological expressions (2017)

<p>Iconicity is a pervasive phenomenon in language that defies the Saussurean dictum of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, not only occurring in phenomena like sound symbolism and ideophones (e.g. Dingemanse 2012), gesture and sign language (e.g. Herlofsky 2005), but also syntax (e.g. Haiman 1985; Van Langendonck 2007). Iconicity is best viewed as a unified notion that manifests itself very differently in different circumstances, some being highly schematical or semiotically general, others related to lower-level cultural customs. Chinese data is particularly revealing in case of the latter because of its logographic nature, but also displays cross-linguistic characteristics in case of the former. In this paper we will use the semantic domain of meteorological expressions in Chinese, with data based on dictionaries like <i>Handian</i> (Handian 漢典 2004) and WordNet (Hsieh & Huang 2009), to illustrate the interplay of iconic patterns on the two different levels: general conception and culture/language specific. We chose ‘weather’ as a domain because it constitutes a highly salient phenomenon that occurs across different languages and cultures (Eriksen, Kittilä & Kolehmainen 2010) and because it provided both ‘normal vocabulary’ as well as ideophones. Thus we can address two main questions in the call for papers.</p><p> </p><p>As for the first question, “whether iconicity is culture-specific or semiotically general”, Chinese displays general types of iconicity found in cross-linguistic typological research, e.g. serial verbs as an iconic mapping of logical-temporal order, or a quite large inventory of ideophones, with many high-iconic imagic (in Peirce’s terminology) mappings between form and meaning. However, their usage of characters as a writing system displays many iconic properties that are absent in e.g. Latin based scripts, as has been long acknowledged in the traditional character classification (<i>liu shu</i> 六書), which includes a category for iconic characters that combined with other characters become indexes. A lexical field analysis of weather expressions shows that the basic level items essentially stem from five different iconic semantic radicals: imagic ones like rain (雨), sun (日), thunder (畾), cloud (云); and an indexical one wind (風). It is curious that the phonological form of most weather expressions is symbolic, displaying almost no iconicity, while the writing system does, e.g. <i>xue</i> 雪 ‘snow’ has a ‘rain’ radical which indicates a form of precipitation.</p><p> </p><p>The second question, “whether iconicity can be combined within or across modalities” can be discussed from the perspective of weather-related Chinese ideophones. On the one hand, with ‘modalities’ referring to the senses, they seem to display a high flexibility concerning cross-modal synaesthesia, e.g. <i>xilihuala</i> 唏哩嘩啦 ‘to rain abundantly’, which depicts both hearing and movement (cf. Van Hoey's (2016) spinning top model). This lexical item has an imagic motivation in its phonological form. On the other hand, when ‘modalities’ refers to spoken vs. written language, ideophones like <i>linlin</i> 淋淋 ‘soaked’ show a different kind of iconicity – indexal, as seen in the semantic radical water (氵). It is mainly this interplay between (virtual) referent, phonological form and written image that is of interest to the topic of iconicity, since sometimes everything is linked through the phenomenon, but in other cases only one of the spoken or written form.</p>