The syntax of temperature predications

The syntactic structures encountered in clauses containing temperature concepts tend to differ from the ones employed in standard intransitive clause types. These constructions are remarkable not only because of their unusual internal makeup, but also because of the great variety in syntactic patterns they exhibit. However, despite the considerable variety in the structure of temperature clauses, identical or near-identical temperature constructions recur in languages around the world with amazing regularity. The present study seeks to explore the reasons for the variety in the structure of temperature predications, as well as the reasons for the frequent recurrence of similar or identical construction types at the cross-linguistic level. The conclusion drawn from the available data is that both phenomena are due to cognitive principles, which allow varying construals of temperature events, but which, because of the universality of these principles, also limit the conceptualization of temperature events to a specific set of possible construals.