PART LANGUAGE ORGANIZATION OF THE LEXICO-SEMANTIC FIELD OF TIME IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

Abstract

The article analyzes the temporal orientations of the lexical units of contemporary English according to the part-language criterion. Although a lot of works are devoted to the study of units with temporal semantics, in particular the study of lexical time units of the English language field in the system of linguistic means and the attempts by linguists to characterize all language means with temporal semantics are fixed, the problem remains relevant and open to research. The purpose of this article is to study the philosophical category of time and its linguistic expression. To achieve the goal it is necessary to find out the place of the philosophical category of time in the language expression and to determine the temporal aspect of all parts of the language in the lexico-semantic system of modern English. The method of the continuous sampling highlightens 543 lexical units with a seme of time (196 nouns, 117 adjectives, 102 adverbs, 81 verbs, 36 prepositions, 11 conjunctions). The kernel of the lexico-semantic field of time consists of 276 lexical units: 102 nouns, 45 adjectives, 53 adverbs, 49 verbs, 24 prepositions and 4 conjunctions. According to the semantic criterion, the lexical-semantic field of time splits into 6 lexical-semantic microfields (noun, adjective, adverbial, verb, prepositional, and conjunctional). On the basis of the criterion of semantic closeness in each lexical-semantic microfield there is a certain number of lexical-semantic groups. The distribution of lexical units with a semes of time is based on the criterion of semantic proximity and semantic content.The semantic structure of the temporal words looks like a series of circles that touch each other and partly overlap on one another, which gives us the opportunity to speak about the interpenetration of individual temporal meanings.