Malimon L. System and Functional Characteristics of Temporal Nouns in Modern English

This dissertation is concerned with the analysis of English temporal nouns on the basis of syntagmatic and paradigmatic principles of enquiry. The semantic structure of the nouns minute, hour, day, week, month, year, time is established and the peculiarities of their grammatical and lexical combinability in fiction texts are determined. Temporal nouns are proved to be characterized by a certain degree of functional proximity which is not defined by the system characteristics of nouns but by the features of their functional regularities, such as frequency and prevalence, as well as grammatical and lexical combinability. The lexical combinability of the analysed nouns depends on both the semantic structure of these nouns and the peculiarities of the semantic structure of their contextual partners