'In the moment' : A cross-linguistic exploration of the lexical concept [MOMENT]

Abstract: Lexical typological studies examine how various languages express similar concepts. Previous research has discussed how the concept of moment is encoded lexically in English, Ancient Greek, and Ancient Egyptian. However, there are no cross-linguistic studies to date that collect data on the lexical expressions associated with the concept of moment. Apart from documenting expressions encoding the concept in various languages, I determine the morphosyntactic status of the collected expressions, analyze the contexts in which they are used, and identify the conceptual sources that the expressions are related to. The data is collected from a convenience sample of 37 mostly unrelated languages using a multiparallel Bible corpus, lexicons, reference grammars, and etymological dictionaries. An expression was found in 27 of the 37 languages. About 74% of the expressions (20 of 27) were used to create temporal adjuncts via affixation of locative case markers and collocation with adpositions. About 41% of the expressions (11 of 27) displayed conceptual sources pertaining to the cognitive domain TIME, while about 30% (8 of 27) were related to VISION. The study contributes to our knowledge of how abstract temporal concepts are expressed lexically.