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Time in Languages, Languages in Time
Edited by Anna Čermáková, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård and Sylvi Rørvik
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 101] 2021
► pp. 283–304

The expression of time in English and Czech children’s literature

A contrastive phraseological perspective

| Charles University, Prague
| Charles University, Prague
| Charles University, Prague

This chapter explores the expression of the concept of time in children’s narrative fiction cross-linguistically, comparing Czech and English. Specifically, it analyses multi-word units and patterns which the respective languages employ when referring to time. The new Engrammer software was developed to facilitate the extraction of n-grams with lemmatised cores and positional mobility, making it possible to compare temporal patterns in English with those used in highly inflectional Czech with variable word-order. The results of the study suggest that in children’s fiction in both languages, time plays an important role in structuring the text, frequently creating dramatic effects. Even though the formal means of expressing time may differ between English and Czech (e.g. diminutives in Czech vs. phrasal description in English), register appears to substantially influence the way time is framed in children’s literature in both languages.

Article outline
  • 1.Language comparison, n-grams, and children’s literature
  • 2.Expressing time with adverbials
  • 3.The corpora
  • 4.The method: From frequent temporal expressions via n-grams to temporal patterns
    • 4.1Frequency lists
    • 4.2N-grams
    • 4.3The tool used: Engrammer
    • 4.4Temporal patterns
    • 4.5An illustration of the method: time and doba
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Textual functions of temporal patterns
    • 5.2A contrastive look at temporal patterns
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpora and Tools
Published online: 17 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.101.12mal
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