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Article published In: Cognitive Linguistic Studies
Vol. 1:2 (2014) ► pp.271–288

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Temporal prepositions explained

Cross-linguistic analysis of English and Swedish unit of time landmarks

 | Department of Language Studies, Umeå University (Sweden)
Published online: 3 April 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.1.2.05fal
To what extent can factors such as the size of a unit of time landmark and zoomed in effects explain the patterns of temporal prepositions in English (Lindstromberg, 1998/2010)? How important are these factors cross-linguistically? This paper is a corpus linguistic analysis of unit of time landmarks in English in and on instances, and in their Swedish equivalents, i and på instances. My aims are to investigate how temporal in and on relationships are construed in terms of spatial ones and to identify shared and differing patterns between these two closely related languages. Shared patterns may provide clues in regard to which factors are salient when time is construed in terms of space. Differing patterns highlight the fact that a given way of construing time in terms of space is not the only alternative. Systematicity at this level of abstraction is potentially useful for the second language (L2) learner.
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