Chapter 8

Time, motion, and cyclicity

This chapter explores two Russian nouns, vremja and pora, both of which mean ‘time’. Evidence from a large web corpus and a smaller corpus with syntactic annotation suggests several differences. In a semantic vector space, there is little overlap between the neighborhoods of the nouns, and they display different collocation patterns and constructional profiles. While the cognitive model time is a resource is characteristic of vremja, but not of pora, moving time is relevant for both nouns. The latter metaphorical model manifests itself as deictic movement towards and away from the ego, as well as non-deictic movement. Evidence is adduced that connects vremja to “linear time,” while the data are inconclusive with regard to a putative relation between pora and “cyclic time.”