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Evolution of Temporal Mentality in Western Culture and Its Reflection in Contemporary English
Time is becoming an increasingly popular research topic in contemporary Humanities due to its central role in shaping and structuring subjective human experience. New research paradigms and conceptual apparatuses enable us to approach the issue of temporal experience from a new angle, focusing on its embeddedness in culture. Multiple research, conducted at the interface between Psychology, Sociology, History, Philosophy, Culture Studies and Linguistics convincingly demonstrates relativity of time, its inseparable connection with culture, which shapes it by determining its flow, principles of its structuring, its meaning and value. The complex of culturally specific ways of perceiving time can be termed “temporal mentality”.
Contemporary western culture has a linear, monochronic concept of time, interpreting the latter as a line, which connects the past, the present, and the future. This vision, however, is the most general, basic notion, which allows for considerable variation as to the division of the time line into segments, the particular significance attributed to each of them, correlation between what is seen as “objective” time flow and subjective temporal experience and other culturally relevant phenomena, all of which appear to be subject to historical change.
The paper aims to reveal current trends in the development of English temporal vocabulary in connection with the evolving temporal mentality. It shows the rapidly increasing saturation of temporal vocabulary with the semantics of eventfulness and defines the role of bodily experience in perceiving and verbalizing time. It demonstrates the scope of language creativity in denoting time and reveals new types of conceptualizations co-existing with the traditional and well studied TIME IS SPACE metaphor.