‘The leopard has given birth’: weather terms in Gisamjanga-Datooga

Meteorological events (ME) pose a notorious challenge to linguistic encoding due to a basic tension between their semantics and syntactic structure which, in most languages, requires a predicate and at least one participant. Since MEs typically do not involve any canonical participants, there is considerable leeway for languages to either construe participants or to find ways to do without them. This contribution seeks to describe the strategies for the expression of weather concepts in the Gisamjanga variety of Datooga, a Southern Nilotic language of Tanzania, and integrate them into the comparative typological framework of Eriksen et al. 2010. Linguistics of weather: Cross-linguistic patterns of meteorological expressions. Studies in Language 34(3). 565–601 and Eriksen et al. 2012. Weather and language. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(6). 383–402. In doing so, we argue that a typological model which claims to represent the full gamut of ME encoding strategies in human languages must incorporate two additional factors: (a) the domain-internal variation of ME encoding strategies encountered within one language, (b) metaphorical ME expressions which cannot be classified as argument- or predicate-framed since neither predicate nor argument directly refer to any weather event. In sum, both of these factors point to the necessity to extend the typological model of ME expression by the parameter of pragmatical markedness, as exemplified in our concluding section.