Abstrakt
The paper examines the use of precision and approximation devices in a subset
of English and Polish temporal expressions. Specifi cally, the corpus-based study
reported here employs the Cognitive Linguistics analytic construct of “construal”
to look into the variable degrees of precision and propositionality as it is coded linguistically
in naturally-occurring data. We fi nd that approximation marking in the
temporal magnitude representations under scrutiny is more pronounced than precision
marking, and there are further conspicuous use asymmetries across languages
(Polish vs. English), construal types (cumulative vs. fractional) and granularity levels
(seconds/minute vs. minutes/hour).
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