Russian, Swedish, and Finnish adpositions meaning ‘under’ and ‘over’ in temporal constructions

Abstract

In Russian, Swedish, and Finnish, adpositions with partly overlapping spatial meanings of ‘under’ and ‘over’ / ‘across’ are used with different temporal meanings, which, from a cognitive linguistic point of view, can be interpreted as evidence for different conceptualizations in these languages. In Russian and Finnish the adpositions meaning ‘under’ are used in the temporal meaning ‘just before’ while in Swedish the adposition has the temporal meaning ‘during’. In Swedish and Finnish the temporal meaning for ‘over’ is ‘throughout the whole period of time’, while in Russian it is ‘after a certain period of time’ or ‘every second’. These constructions and the limitations of their use are described for Russian, while very few studies exist for Swedish and Finnish. In our study, we use corpus and Internet data to investigate what types of lexicalized temporal units are allowed in the temporal constructions under investigation.

Keywords

• Russian
• Swedish
• Finnish
• time and space
• conceptualization
• time metaphors