Weather, Metaphor, and the Lexicon: A Corpus Study of Medieval German

While descriptive and allegorical depictions of actual meteorological phenomena appear throughout medieval German literary genres and text types, the great bulk of weather vocabulary is comprised of phraseological and figurative units that make use of weather terms as a signifier of human, divine, and other qualities This article addresses a broad corpus of Middle High German texts to outline some of the uses of these units and the variety of their forms that typify this largely figurative domain of lexis and human experience.