Just a moment
-
Thomas Egan
Abstract
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.
Abstract
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.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Time in languages, languages in time 1
- Slavery and Britain in the 19th century 9
- Diachronic change in the ordering of kinship binomials 39
- Tracing processes in auxiliarization 67
- Translating verbal tenses between tensed and tenseless languages 95
- From language to language, from time to time 129
- Just a moment 155
- Then and now in English and French 181
- Time adverbials in English and Norwegian news discourse 201
- Minutes of action! A contrastive analysis of time expressions in English and Norwegian football match reports 229
- Cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic uses of tensed verb phrases in the methods sections of master’s theses 255
- The expression of time in English and Czech children’s literature 283
- Index 305
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Time in languages, languages in time 1
- Slavery and Britain in the 19th century 9
- Diachronic change in the ordering of kinship binomials 39
- Tracing processes in auxiliarization 67
- Translating verbal tenses between tensed and tenseless languages 95
- From language to language, from time to time 129
- Just a moment 155
- Then and now in English and French 181
- Time adverbials in English and Norwegian news discourse 201
- Minutes of action! A contrastive analysis of time expressions in English and Norwegian football match reports 229
- Cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic uses of tensed verb phrases in the methods sections of master’s theses 255
- The expression of time in English and Czech children’s literature 283
- Index 305
