Mode of time as a linguistic concept: to the question of language representation in the literary text

The study of modus as a linguistic concept has a long tradition: to date, its content has been revealed in detail, and various modus categories have been identified. At the same time, the concept of “mode of time”, which originates from such scientific areas as philosophy and sociology, has been studied relatively little in linguistics, despite the fact that a number of researchers have already made attempts to analyse this phenomenon in relation to various discursive spheres. The aim of this article is to find out what linguistic means represent the specificity of the mode of time in a literary text. The material of the study is the works of Narine Abgaryan, an Armenian Russian-speaking writer, one of the brightest representatives of contemporary women’s prose: the novels “People Who Are Always with Me” (2014), “Three Apples Fell from the Sky” (2015), “Simon” (2020), as well as the collection of short stories “People of our yard” (2021). The article considers the “core” lexical units as the key linguistic means of representing the mode of time: the lexeme “time” proper, as well as “past”, “present” and “future”. In addition, the contextual features of the use of temporal adverbs are analysed, the most indicative of which are the adverbs “forever”, “long”, “long ago”, “sometime”, “earlier”, “someday”, “soon”. It is concluded that time is a significant component of N. Abgaryan’s works, the specificity of representation of time modus operandi clearly reflects the peculiarities of the author’s linguistic picture of the world. The mode of the past plays a key role in the narrative: the past turns out to be one of the main factors influencing the present and the future of the characters; at the same time, the negative evaluation of past events in the perception of the characters and the positive one in the perception of the author himself come to the fore. Modes of the present and the future are represented to a lesser extent, often only in comparison with the past, but there is a clear tendency towards a positive evaluation of the future mode both by the characters and directly by the author of the works. It is noted that this study is one of the stages in the development of a comprehensive algorithm for describing the modes of time in a fiction text, which, in turn, contributes to the study of the language of modern Russian prose.

time, mode of time, literary text, past, present, future, Narine Abgaryan