In:Conceptualizations of Time
Edited by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
[Human Cognitive Processing 52] 2016
► pp. 295–316
Time-discretising adverbials
Distributional evidence of conceptualisation patterns
Published online: 14 June 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.52.13pez
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.52.13pez
This paper looks at the distribution of selected adverbials used to discretise
and quantify time in units of minutes, seconds and hours in reference language
corpora of Polish and English. We carry out an exploratory analysis of the distributional
patterns of such expressions and report three main findings. Firstly,
we observe that the discretisation intervals for minutes and seconds diverge
from the overall frequency distribution of cardinal numerals in the two corpora.
Secondly, a significant level of correlation has been found between frequency
distributions of n-seconds and n-minutes time adverbials in Polish and English
data. Finally, the distribution of salient intervals for n-hours adverbials differs
considerably from the discretisation patterns observed for n-seconds and
n-minutes expressions. We relate these findings to general cognitive aspects
of quantification and further link them to the iconic clock dial-based time
conceptualisation.
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Góral, Michal Stanislaw & Juana Teresa Guerra de La Torre
2024. Event-based time in Polish culture and language. International Journal of Language and Culture 11:2 ► pp. 211 ff.
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