Expression of Meteorological Events in Kiswahili

Abstract

In the tripartite division of expression of meteorological events, a few tokens of
datasets from Kiswahili had been used by Eriksen et al. (2010, 2012). This
paper presents further detailed evidence to substantiate the way Kiswahili
grammar expresses meteorological events encountered in East Africa. In this
way, the paper contributes to the typology of the tripartite division of the
mechanisms used to encode weather events. The lexical datasets were
extracted from TUKI (2014), while sentences gathered from native speakers of
Kiswahili 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 of
wind and rain are predominantly encoded by the predicate-type and argumentpredicate
type, thunder and lightning are realised through argument-type.
These pair with static weather events of coldness and warmness. They also
vary from other forms of static weather event of humidity, which is realised by
argument-predicate type, together with sunshine. The findings corroborate
partially with the Unaccusative Hypothesis in that Kiswahili grammar bears
some weather verbs which reveal the combination of the features of
unaccusative and unergative verbs. But the weather verbs dondoka ‘drip, fall’
and nyesha ‘rain’ are typically unaccusative.