Tsymbal S. SPACE and TIME concepts’ verbalization in modern Chinese (based on the phraseological units chengyu).

The dissertation is devoted to the comprehensive analysis of means and manners of such global concepts verbalization, as SPACE and TIME, in modern Chinese, based on the phraseological units chengyu. Relying on the principles of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, according to which, our conceptual system is metaphorical by its nature, and the concept itself is a metaphorical structure, the SPACE, TIME and TIME-SPACE concepts’ metaphorical realization in the Chinese phraseological units chengyu was chosen as the subject of our research. Reflecting on the problem of SPACE and TIME concepts linguistic objectification in modern Chinese, first, it is worth paying attention to the Chinese native speakers’ conceptual picture of the world. In particular, to the fact that the traditional Chinese ideas about the universe and the place of China in the world, which differed in excessive metaphoricalness, had a significant influence on its formation and development. One of the results of the metaphorical rethinking of reality was the use of spatial metaphors in Chinese to denote time, despite the wide variety of lexical and grammatical means of expressing the spatial and temporal relationships. These and other reasons postulate the need to isolate the third, unified concept in modern Chinese, TIME-SPACE, which reflects the traditional Chinese awareness of the cyclic transformation of time into space, and vice versa, their infinite interaction.