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Article published In: Issues in Humour Cognition
Edited by Marta Dynel
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 16:1] 2018
► pp. 128–151

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Temporal-magnitudinal construal coding

A usage account from Polish

 | University of Łódź
 | University of Łódź
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00006.dec
Abstract
This article looks into the interface of temporality and quantification. Drawing on the principles of Cognitive Linguistics, we use experimental as well as corpus methods to provide evidence on how the conceptual organisation and linguistic coding of content can play a role in meaning construction. With that broad agenda in mind, a major objective is to shed light on the construct of conventionalisation. For that purpose, construal coding variants are examined with a focus on nominal phrases that express time quantities. The examination involves two construal types (termed “cumulative” and “fractional”) that differ primarily in their prominence configurations, across three granularity levels of time conceptualisation. Our main finding – that the fractional and cumulative constructions are asymmetrically conventionalised – is contextualised through a qualitative analysis of naturally-occurring data to identify additional language use patterns and offer explanatory hypotheses.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Quantitative analysis
    • 2.1Distributional analysis
    • 2.2Usage patterns
  • 3.Experimental data
    • 3.1Participants, materials and procedure
    • 3.2Cross-variant and cross-level analysis
    • 3.3The elicited data
      • 3.3.1Level 1
        • Cumulative
        • Fractional
      • 3.3.2Level 2
        • Cumulative
        • Fractional
          • Pół stulecia
          • Pół wieku
      • 3.3.3Level 3
        • Cumulative
        • Fractional
          • Pół millennium
          • Pół tysiąclecia
      • 3.3.4Discussion of the elicited data
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
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