Expression of Meteorological Events in Kiswahili

Abstract

In the tripartite division of expression of meteorological events, a few tokens ofdatasets from Kiswahili had been used by Eriksen et al. (2010, 2012). Thispaper presents further detailed evidence to substantiate the way Kiswahiligrammar expresses meteorological events encountered in East Africa. In thisway, the paper contributes to the typology of the tripartite division of themechanisms used to encode weather events. The lexical datasets wereextracted from TUKI (2014), while sentences gathered from native speakers ofKiswahili mainly through targeted elicitation and grammaticality judgements.Findings in Kiswahili corroborate with this tripartite division. However,variations are apparently highlighted. For instance, while dynamic events ofwind and rain are predominantly encoded by the predicate-type and argumentpredicatetype, thunder and lightning are realised through argument-type.These pair with static weather events of coldness and warmness. They alsovary from other forms of static weather event of humidity, which is realised byargument-predicate type, together with sunshine. The findings corroboratepartially with the Unaccusative Hypothesis in that Kiswahili grammar bearssome weather verbs which reveal the combination of the features ofunaccusative and unergative verbs. But the weather verbs dondoka ' drip, fall ' and nyesha ' rain ' are typically unaccusative.