The Linguistics of the Environment: A Corpus-based Study of German Precipitation Constructions
Creators: Heinrich, Claudia
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2024

<p>This dissertation provides a corpus-based constructional analysis of precipitation events in German (e.g., es regnet ‘it rains’) based on real-world data from Sketch Engine’s deTenTen13 16.5 billion-word web corpus. The research was sparked by a large, cross-linguistic survey of weather event encoding by Eriksen, Kittilä and Kolehmainen (2010, 2012, 2015), who propose a three-way typology of meteorological events (MEs) with a focus on precipitation. They suggest a typological scale of precipitation encoding, based on which element bears the semantic weight of marking the precipitate: the predicate, an argument, or a combination of both. The proposed types are argument type with a light verb (e.g., Rain falls), predicate type with a dummy subject (It rains), and argument-predicate type with a semantically heavy subject and predicate (Rain rains/Snow rains––the so-called cognate and split types, respectively). While they assert that languages universally possess the argument type of ME construction, they claim that Germanic languages typically adhere to the universally rare predicate type. While this may be true when speakers are commenting on immediately observable precipitation events, the corpus data show that German not only employs all kinds of precipitate encoding (e.g., Regen fällt ‘rain is falling’, es regnet ‘it is raining’, Regen/Schnee regnet ‘rain/snow is raining’), but may add a second light argument in the argument constructions (e.g., Es gibt Regen ‘it gives rain’) or may even exploit other strategies by utilizing a prepositional phrase such as bei Regen ‘while/if it’s raining’ (lit. ‘at rain’). Additionally, there are culture-specific causal agents like Frau Holle ‘Mother Hulda’ and Petrus ‘St. Peter’, who are regularly employed as the entities responsible for certain types of precipitation.<br>
My analysis demonstrates that the choice of ME construction depends on extra-propositional contextual factors such as tense/aspect marking, temporal and locative modification, quality and quantity specification, figurativity, presence of stance-taking elements, genre and regional differences, as well as the individual precipitate type (i.e. rain, snow, sleet, hail). For example, the prevalent German structure es gibt ‘there is’ (lit. ‘it gives’) is known to express absolute existence (Es gibt einen Gott ‘There is a God’). However, in the examined data, it is predominantly used in past and future tense (60%) while less than 20% of es gibt Regen ‘there is rain’ (lit. ‘it gives rain’) utterances express existential or generic propositions. At the same time, the PRECIPITATE+fallen (‘PRECIPITATE +fall’) argument-type construction seems to be chiefly weather reporting, as part of a technical meteorological genre, whereby information about the average weather in a specific region is conveyed, or in texts on “how weather works”, which goes hand-in-hand with their predominant use in existential or generic propositions. This construction also appears frequently in literary genres. However, the literary genre also attracts the argument-predicate type of ME construction, as in the cognate type (e.g. Grauer Regen regnet dir aufs Dach ‘Grey rain is raining onto your roof’) or split type (e.g. Herbstspaziergang bei dem es Schnee regnete ‘Autumn walk where it rained snow’).<br>
Ultimately, there is no homogeneous distribution characterizing the interaction of precipitation type and construction type. Correspondingly, we find that hail, for example, overwhelmingly appears in the “default” predicate construction when the event is figurative (es hagelte Beschwerden ‘it hailed complaints’) and largely imbued with negative semantic prosody. MEs expressing a literal use of hail prefer the argument construction. Consequently, the present investigation provides evidence that Erikson et al.’s (2010) typology is too coarse-grained with regard to German, and therefore needs refinement. In summary, this study emphasizes the diversity of constructions employed within the German expressive field of MEs, while providing a qualitative and quantitative analysis of how syntactic or constructional variation is driven by interaction with a number of lexical, extra-propositional, and extra-linguistic variables.</p>