Verbalisation of the Concept QUALITY TIME

The aim of this article is to analyse the content of the concept QUALITY TIME and to identify its structure and specifics. The content of the concept has been analysed on the basis of the dictionary entries, the Corpus of modern American English (COCA), and several Internet blogs. The authors have applied a complex methodology, including the methods of descriptive, conceptual and component analysis based on dictionary definitions, as well as the technique of quantitative calculation and translation into Russian. In this article, the concept is understood as the basic unit of human mentality, which is the result of the cognitive activity of the individual and society, which carries information about the reflected phenomenon and has an ordered internal structure (Z.D. Popova, I.A. Sternin). The key word-representative of the concept under consideration is a set expression quality time. The concept QUALITY TIME is relatively new; it is a notion-concept, which is endemic, unique, nonequivalent, ethnospecific in the conceptual map of the English language. Having analysed the conceptual signs of QUALITY TIME, singled out on the basis of data from monolingual dictionaries, the authors can offer the following generalised definition of the concept's name: QUALITY TIME is a free time spent with pleasure in a good company; time devoted to family and friends, especially children, spouses, loved ones, friends who often do not have enough attention; when there is no need to simultaneously engage in other things, work, etc. The core of the nominative field of the concept is represented by three most intense conceptual signs: (1) who the time is spent with; first of all, it is children and family; (2) emotional-evaluative sign: it is something pleasant, bringing happiness; (3) the quality that people themselves invest in the time spent together rather than its quantity. In the near periphery of the QUALITY TIME concept, the following cognitive signs can be distinguished: (1) aim: to strengthen relations with close people; (2) place: home, as well as other pleasant and interesting places outside the house; (3) particular type of activity: favourite occupation, travel; (4) the importance of this time for everyone; (5) its shortage for most people. When translating the name of this concept, the authors suggest using the calque “kachestvennoe vremya”, as the variants of the descriptive translation are long and inconvenient for use. To summarise, the QUALITY TIME concept is a relatively new, emotive and value-based concept integrating the ideas of time spent in pleasant pursuits in a pleasant company, especially with family, time of rest and relaxation. A topical direction of the further study of the QUALITY TIME concept is carrying out a psycholinguistic experiment by the method of associative analysis.

Keywords

Authors

References