The expression of time in English and Czech children's literature : A contrastive phraseological perspective
Abstract
In our paper, we explore the expression of the concept of time in children's fiction cross-linguistically to find out to what extent it is conditioned culturally and linguistically on the one hand, and by the register itself on the other. Our approach is rooted in frequency-based phraseology and the neo-Firthian tradition, "where meaning... is said to reside in multi-word units rather than single words" (Ebeling & Ebeling 2013, 65).
By identifying recurrent multi-word patterns in children's fiction, we aim at uncovering "lexical networks that contribute to the construction of literary meaning and cohesion in the text that is of specific importance for the young reader" (Čermáková 2018, 130). The study is data-driven, based on n-gram extraction.
This raises the methodological questions of the potential contribution of n-gram-based approaches to language comparison (Granger 2014; Čermáková & Chlumská 2017). Using comparable (approx. 1 million word) corpora of children's fiction, two typologically distant languages are compared: highly inflectional Czech with relatively free word-order, and predominantly analytical English.
In both languages we proceed from a list of 3-/4-grams comprising (parts of) phrases and clauses, semantically related to the concept of time (Hasselgård 2017). Recurrent temporal expressions (e.g. time, moment; doba - 'time', chvíle - 'while') identified in the n-grams then serve as a basis for recovering recurring meaningful, linguistically structured temporal 'patterns' in the corpora.
The 'patterns' are skipgrams with positional variation (Cheng et al.) which comprise lemmatised temporal expressions. This makes it possible to avoid the effects of both morphological diversity and word-order variability.
We found out that in children's fiction in both languages time plays an important role in structuring the text (e.g. for a moment she ... (but) then/afterwards), frequently creating dramatic effects (e.g. just in time (to); Thompson and Sealey 2007). Even though the means of expressing time may differ (e.g. the prevalence of temporal clause fragments in Czech and incomplete phrases in English), register appears to influence substantially the way time is framed in children's literature in both languages.