Duration as length Vs amount in English and Spanish: a corpus study

Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier; Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel

Publication:
Duration as length Vs amount in English and Spanish: a corpus study

dc.contributor.author	Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier
dc.contributor.author	Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel
dc.contributor.department	Filología Inglesa
dc.contributor.other	Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
dc.date.accessioned	2026-02-12T18:47:56Z
dc.date.available	2026-02-12T18:47:56Z
dc.date.copyright	© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
dc.date.issued	2021-04-12
dc.description.abstract	Previous psycholinguistic studies have suggested that English and Spanish express temporal duration through different metaphors. English tends to use the time-as-length metaphor (e.g. I have been waiting for a long time), while Spanish prefers the time-as-quantity metaphor (e.g. he esperado mucho tiempo; ‘I have waited much time’). However, these results conflated two different construals: the temporal duration construal, which can use length or quantity metaphors, (e.g. long time, that didn’t last much time) and the time-as-a-resource construal, which mostly employs quantity metaphors (e.g. you spent too much time). This study confirms through corpus linguistic data that English favors the time-as-length metaphor when expressing temporal duration, while it favors the time-as-quantity metaphor when expressing the time-as-a-resource construal. On the other hand, Spanish employs the time-as-quantity metaphor both in the duration and the resource construal. In addition, English shows a higher frequency of time-as-resource expressions, while Spanish shows a higher frequency of duration metaphors. This difference might be explained by the fact that English has been classified as a monochronic culture, conceptualizing time as a valuable object, while Spanish is a polychronic culture, categorizing time in a more abstract and flexible way.
dc.format	application/pdf
dc.format.extent	12
dc.identifier.citation	Metaphor and Symbol, 2021, Vol. 36, N. 2, pp. 74-84
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2021.1887706
dc.identifier.eissn	1532-7868
dc.identifier.issn	1092-6488
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10201/204662
dc.language	eng
dc.publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
dc.relation	This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades, Agencia Estatal de Investigacion and FEDER/UE funds (grant number PGC2018-1551 097658- B-100) and the CERU On The Move funding scheme (R.1256/2018).
dc.relation.publisherversion	https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10926488.2021.1887706
dc.rights.accessRights	info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
dc.subject.ods	No relacionado con ningún objetivo de desarrollo sostenible
dc.title	Duration as length Vs amount in English and Spanish: a corpus study
dc.type	info:eu-repo/semantics/article
dc.type.version	info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
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