English phraseological units with temporal meaning: semantic characteristic

The article is devoted to the problem of phraseological units with temporal meaning, which are analyzed from the point of view of their semantic integrity, structure and means providing their stability and cohesion. The object of the study are phraseological units connected with the notion of time, containing the names of the days of the week, seasons, parts of the day and generalizing words in English. The phraseological units, which are the subject of this study, were identified by sampling from monolingual and bilingual phraseological dictionaries, from explanatory dictionaries of the Russian and English languages, from synonymous dictionaries of the Russian and English languages. Before proceeding with the analysis of phraseological combinations with temporal meanings, we consider the lexeme time, which is the base of them; distinguish its basic and peripheral meanings. We also try to analyze the structure of the lexical-semantic field time, define its lexical-semantic groups, scrutinize it from the point of view of phraseological activity. Trying to clarify the system organization of temporal phraseological units, we consider the field approach applied by many researchers that allowed us to identify the phraseological macrofield of time and phraseological microfields, containing certain differential semes. An interesting and important part of the research is the problem of communicative-pragmatic functions of phraseological units with the component time. The relevance of this study is that acquaintance with phraseology, including phraseological units with temporal meaning, allows not only natural and emotional communication, nut a deeper understanding of the history of the people, their attitude to human strengths and weaknesses, the specifics of their worldview.