Higher sem. Biling. Julia Prentice: Doing 'time' in an additional language

Higher seminar in Bilingualism. Doing 'time' in an additional language. A usage-based study on entrenchment of time constructions in the minds of adult learners of Swedish. Julia Prentice, Professor, Department of Swedish, Multilingualism, Language Technology, University of Gothenburg.

Seminar

Date:

Tuesday 14 October 2025

Time:

15.00 – 16.30

Location:

Room D480

Time expressions are frequently used and carry important interactional functions. Expressing time is also a linguistically and cognitively complex undertaking: languages may offer a vast variety of different temporal expressions that specify temporal relations in subtly different ways. The expressions range from highly fixed or idiomatic expressions (now, at that instant), to flexible but compositional expressions using units of time (in five minutes, during last year), to creative uses that allow measuring time in other units (five episodes later, three bus stops ago). Despite its prominence, we currently know relatively little about how learners of Swedish as an additional language (AL) acquire this expressive repertoire and what factors play a role in an individual learner’s success in doing so. 

In my talk I will present a project that seeks to investigates how adult learners' cognitive entrenchment of Swedish time constructions is influenced by various factors related to their conventionalization in general language use, as well as to language structure, the individual's background, and the social context of learning. I will discuss the purpose and the usage-based, multilingual, and socio-cognitive framework of the project (Schmid 2020, Höder 2018, Höder, Prentice & Tingsell 2021) and present some preliminary results from a pilot experiment and an ongoing corpus study. The latter is aiming at identifying relevant time constructions for further investigation in order to produce new knowledge about the interaction between patterns of language use and the AL learning of communicatively highly relevant constructions. 

Julia Prentice

About the Higher seminar in Research on Bilingualism