PERSONAL PERCEPTION OF TIME EXPRESSED BY ENGLISH SET EXPRESSIONS IN MODERN LITERARY TEXTS
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2017-10-96-102
The article considers individual aspect of time perception. Firstly, a brief theoretical review of problem studies goes. Depending on mood and activity, personal time proceeds either quickly or slowly and it can be either pleasant or not. Positive emotions bring a deceptive impression of a fast flow of time. Negative emotions, on the contrary, subjectively lengthen the time intervals. The practical part examines around 30 modern English set expressions denoting time as perceived by a person. The conclusion says that the perception of time as short/long or pleasant/unpleasant is expressed in speech through fixed collocations used by authors of modern fiction. Short time is described in dictionary English set expressions as “fun” and “it flies”. Long time “hangs heavily on one’s hands.” Unpleasant time is “bad, hard, dark, evil, rough, thin, lean and it is not one’s own. Pleasant time is “good, easy, the best of one’s life, the time of one’s life, high and there’s a lot of it”. Pleasant time “has its moments, it is one’s finest hour and it makes one’s day”. Fiction authors’ creative thinking depicts bad time as “poor, awful, dreadful, horrible, terrible, very uncomfortable, devil of a time and hell of a bloody time”. Pleasant time is “nice, lovely, great, excellent, delightful, smashing, terrific, fantastic, marvelous, riotous, and dead good”. The considered aspect of a writer’s individual style of personal, timerelated vocabulary is worth further research.
Keywords: idiom, set expression, subjective time, personal time, perception of time described by language units, English fiction, literary text
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Issue: 10, 2017
Series of issue: Issue 10
Rubric: GERMANIC LANGUAGES
Pages: 96 — 102
Downloads: 1403