Weather and Language

Abstract

Abstract This paper summarizes current findings in the cross‐linguistic study of meteorological constructions. It provides both a typology of weather events and a typology of encoding formats used for the expression of weather in and across languages. The discussion shows that there is a correlation between these two parameters: there are clear tendencies in the distribution of the various encoding types across the various event types. This gives rise to a typology of languages which explains linguistic variation in the encoding of meteorological events.