Verbalization of the notion of time in present-day English

Abstract

The universal notion of time, alongside the basic notion of space, is believed to determine the formation of a huge number of other notions of the human mind. The results of time interpretation are fixed first and foremost in the semantics of the lexical units of national languages. The novelty of this research is that the noun synonyms to the lexeme time in present-day English have been established and analyzed with their subsequent grouping in synonymic rows within the core of the nominative field of time. The structure of the polysemous lexeme time, which consists of nine lexico-semantic variants, was chosen as guidance for synonymic rows organization. On the ground of the established obligatory and optional ties between them, among which hyper-hyponymic relations turn out to be fundamental, the semantic network of the core of the nominative field of time has been revealed and visualized. The network is based on four central hypersemes that represent the main features of the notion of time verbalized by the noun units of present-day English. A clear tendency of synonyms to express time metaphorically and metonymically in terms of ‘quantity’ in close connection to the components ‘something that happens’ and ‘state’ has been established.