Degrees of Propositionality in Construals of Time Quantities

• Authors: Mikołaj Deckert , Piotr Pęzik
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper investigates the possible conceptual bases of differences between seemingly synonymous and easily definable temporal expressions. Looking at the usage patterns of nominal temporal phrases in reference corpora of English and Polish we attempt to relate these subtleties to the different granularity of the cognitive scales on which construals of time quantities in general are based. More specifically, we focus on a subset of nominal temporal expressions which adhere to the “number + time unit” pattern, matching what Haspelmath (1997: 26) describes as “culture-bound artificial time units”. Using the British National Corpus (BNC) and the National Corpus of Polish (NCP), we first analyse both the variation and the regularity found in naturally-occurring samples of Polish and English. Finally, we compare the patterns of use emerging from the two corpora and arrive at cross-linguistic generalisations about the conceptualisation of time quantities.

Keywords

EN

time; temporal expressions; cognitive linguistics; Polish; corpus linguistics; conceptualisation; English

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 341-353

Dates

published

2014-12-30

Contributors

author

Mikołaj Deckert

• University of Łódź

author

Piotr Pęzik

• University of Łódź

References

• Alverson, Hoyt 1994. Semantics and experience: Universal metaphors of time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Casasanto, Daniel & Lera Boroditsky. 2008. Time in the mind: Using space to think about time, Cognition 106, 579–593.
• Clark, Herbert H. 1973. Space, time, semantics and the child, In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press, 27–63.
• Dehaene, Stanislas & Jacques Mehler 1992. Cross-linguistic regularities in the frequency of number words, Cognition, 43: 1–29.
• Davidson, Donald 1967. Truth and meaning, Synthese 17(3), 304–323.
• Evans, Vyvyan 2004. The structure of time. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Evans, Vyvyan 2013. Temporal frames of reference, Cognitive Linguistics 24(3), 393–435.
• Evans, Vyvyan & Melanie Green 2006. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Mahwah, NJ and Edinburgh: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates/Edinburgh University Press.
• Everett, Caleb & Madora, Keren 2012. Quantity recognition among speakers of an anumeric language, Cognitive Science 36: 1, 130–141.
• Everett, Caleb 2013. Linguistic relativity and numeric cognition: New light on a prominent test case, Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 91–103
• Geeraerts Dirk & Hubert Cuyckens 2007. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Geeraerts, Dirk 2006. (ed.) Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Gelman, Rochel & Gallistel, Randy C. 1978. The Child’s Understanding of Number. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.
• Gruber, Jeffrey 1965. Studies in lexical relations. Cambridge: MIT.
• Haspelmath, Martin 1997. From space to time: Temporal adverbials in the world’s languages. Munich and Newcastle: Lincom Europa.
• Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 1, Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pęzik, Piotr 2012. Wyszukiwarka PELCRA dla danych NKJP. In Adam Przepiórkowski, Mirosław Bańko, Rafał Górski, and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (eds.) Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 253–279.
• Pica, Pierre, Lemer, Cathy, Izard, Véronique & Stanislas, Dehaene 2004. Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. Science 306, 499–503.
• Sarnecka, Barbara W. & Carey, Susan 2008. How counting represents number: What children must learn and when they learn it, Cognition, 108, 662–667.
• Szabó, Zoltán G. 2013. Compositionality, In Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Werning, Markus 2012. Non-Symbolic Compositional Representation and Its Neuronal Foundations: Towards an Emulative Semantics, In Markus Werning, Wolfram Hinzen, and Edouard Machery (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality, Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics. Oxford New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 633–724.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/rela-2015-0003