An Analysis of Adjectives Describing Meteorological Phenomena
Dong-Young Lee · Studies in Linguistics · 2016
Diverse meteorological phenomena such as rain, snow, sleet, wind, thunderstorm, hurricane, fog, and cloud are mentioned in daily weather news. This study aimed to analyze adjectives used for describing meteorological phenomena. To analyze these adjectives I first constructed a corpus of weather news obtained from web sites. Then I extracted adjectives describing meteorological phenomena from the corpus by following several steps that included the use of a concordancing software and a POS (part-of-speech) tagger. After that, on the basis of their meanings related to each meteorological phenomenon, these adjectives are classified into seven groups: Intensity, Time, Area, Temperature, Duration, Property, and Subjective Feeling. For instance, adjectives such as heavy, severe, thick, moderate, and light are classified into the group Intensity. Depending on meteorological phenomena, the range of the use of each adjective describing them appears to vary. That is, some adjectives are used to describe only a certain phenomenon, while others are employed to describe many. Therefore, this study systematically shows the types of adjectives used for describing diverse meteorological phenomena and restrictions on the use of them.