Cover not available
Part of
Conceptualizations of Time
Edited by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
[Human Cognitive Processing 52] 2016
► pp. 295–316

Time-discretising adverbials

Distributional evidence of conceptualisation patterns

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.
Keywords: adverbials of time, distributional corpus analysis, English, Polish, quantification, time discretisation
Published online: 14 June 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.52.13pez
References (15)
References
Barlow, M., & Kemmer, S. (eds.). 2000. Usage Based Models of Language. Center for the Study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
BNC, Consortium. 2001. The British National Corpus, Version 2 (BNC World). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services.Google Scholar
Gelman, R., & Gallistel, C.R. 1978. The child’s understanding of number. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M. 1997. From Space to Time: Temporal Adverbials in the World’s Languages. Munich and Newcastle: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Hempl, G. 2009. The Sexagesimal System and the Cradle of the Aryans. The Classical Review 16(8), 413–416. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langacker, R.W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1, Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. 2007. Polysemy, Prototypes, and Radial Categories. In D. Geeraerts & H. Cuyckens (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 139–169). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lewy, H. 1949. Origin and Development of the Sexagesimal System of Numeration. Journal of the American Oriental Society 69(1), 1–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosch, E. 1978. Principles of Categorization. In E. Rosch & B.B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization (pp. 27–48). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Sarnecka, B.W., and Carey, S. 2008. “How Counting Represents Number: What Children Must Learn and When They Learn It.” Cognition 108, 3: 662–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinha, C. et al. 2011. When Time Is Not Space: The Social and Linguistic Construction of Time Intervals and Temporal Event Relations in an Amazonian Culture. Language and Cognition 3(1), 137–169. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Talmy, L. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. 1: Concept Structuring Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Team, R. Development Core. 2008. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL].Google Scholar
Thureau-Dangin, F. 1939. Sketch of a History of the Sexagesimal System. Osiris 7, 95–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar