Just a moment

This chapter investigates two temporal lexemes, English moment and Norwegian øyeblikk, which may encode either a point in time (‘x happened at time y’) or an interval of time (‘x lasted for time y’). The data for the study comprise all instances of the two lexemes in the English and Norwegian original language texts and translations in the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus. While both lexemes are commonly used to encode time intervals, moment is almost twice as likely as øyeblikk to refer to a point in time, suggesting that moment is somewhat more polysemous. This impression is reinforced by the evidence of the translations, where moment is more likely to be used to translate øyeblikk than vice versa.