Semantic Study Of Russian Time Category

Time is the form in which moving matter exists,it is the continuity and sequence of the process of material motion.Time is often compared to a long river,to money and life,to show the value of time gone forever.It is an objective existence,independent of human will.Yet,while human beings also regard time as a given objective fact,and all humans measure their periodic behavior on a natural scale.Therefore,time again appears as subjective existence.It is believed that time can be located in the past,present and future.Humanity’s concept of time should be reflected by the form of language.Therefore,time is an important factor that constitutes a complete language expression and is bound to become an important object of language research.Based on relevant theories of semantics and cognitive linguistics,this dissertation studies the temporal category of Russian language from two aspects: sememe analysis and metaphor theory.We divide time categories into grammatical categories,lexical categories and semantic categories.Grammatical time category subjectively reflects the time positioning of events in the past,present,and future;Lexical time category describes the time environment of the occurrence and end of an event,which is reflected in the time-point relationship.For example,вчера,сегодня,завтра etc.,and the duration of events are reflected in the temporal relationship,such as два часа,один годetc.;Semantic time category mainly analyzes the time elements contained in words,which may be expressed as time-point relation,or time period relation,or the postural relation of predicates.These different levels of time information have different functions of compatibility,antagonism,coordination and selection in syntactical combinatorial relations,and have an important effect on the overall time structure of sentences or between statements.This work focuses on the semantic level of temporal categories,with the time nouns момент,минута and the time adjectives давний,недавний as the analysis cases.Through large volumes of language materials,we can understand the semantic elements of time,the restriction and selection effect of these elements on the lexical combination relation,the body and state relation embodied in the human identity,as well as status relation nouns and the internal semantic predicates of недавний.This paper analyzes the different expressions of these temporal semantic elements and postural relationships at the syntactic level.