Time-discretising adverbials

Distributional evidence of conceptualisation patterns

Piotr Pęzik

Mikołaj Deckert

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, time discretisation, quantification, distributional corpus analysis, English, Polish

Published online: 14 June 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.52.13pez

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