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In:Thinking and Speaking About Time: A cognitive linguistic approach
Edited by Rita Brdar-Szabó and Mario Brdar
[Human Cognitive Processing 81] 2026
► pp. 102–113

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Chapter 3
Yesterday’s eve

Patterns of polysemy among the deictic temporals of Australian languages

 | Monash UniversityMelbourne | University of South Africa
Published online: 27 January 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.81.03gab
Abstract
This chapter surveys the patterns of polysemy (or, ‘colexification’) exhibited by deictic temporal adverbs denoting ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ in a sample of forty-five Australian Aboriginal languages. While some polysemic links are ubiquitous (such as the colexification of ‘today’ and ‘now’), others are extremely rare (e.g. the Mbararam term alŋgi, which colexifies ‘yesterday’ and ‘down river’). To probe the patterns of semantic change underlying more common cases of colexification — such as between ‘tomorrow’ and ‘morning’ — I consider cases of partial colexification, where the two meanings are formally differentiated despite sharing a common root. In such cases, it is most often the time of day temporals ‘morning’ and ‘afternoon’ that are diachronically prior, with deictic temporals ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ morphologically derived from them.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Today
  • 3.Yesterday
    • 3.1Yesterday + afternoon ~ evening ~ night
    • 3.2Yesterday + morning
  • 4.Tomorrow
    • 4.1Tomorrow + morning
    • 4.2Tomorrow + afternoon ~ evening ~ night
    • 4.3Tomorrow + yesterday
  • 5.By and by
  • 6.Signed languages
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (57)
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