Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

if a door had opened, and one went in and stood gazing silently about (194-5) 
(20) A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among 
them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous. (152) 
(21) Mr Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn (42) 
(22) Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. (120 – 1) 
Typically, the grammatical aspect of time described above is claimed to carry no interpretive 
meaning and serve only as a representation of the grammatical peculiarities in a particular language. 
However, some linguists do not support this point of view. The lengths to which they have gone in 
order to throw light on this question are truly remarkable – if only the accounts are to be believed. 
One of the best known reports concerns Stevenson’s insights. Indeed, his way of determining the 
types of the notion of time is that of a close interrelation between the grammatical, lexical, and 
semantic sides of time. According to Stevenson (1998: 75), in general, the importance of time in 
Woolf’s fiction is very important because in Modernism, people spontaneously react to the events 
in the world and try to understand them by establishing certain physically measured and empirically 
based boundaries, such as distance in time and space. The main evidence would be the application 
of the systems of measurements for time and space, namely: years, months, days, and hours as 
pieces separated from the temporal whole, as symbolic ways of dividing time and space into smaller 
units. Thus, grammatical time, or tense, serves as a means of expressing time in different situations 
described in the novel so that the meaning of the time conveyed could be understood with the help 
of these general rules, grammatical features, or peculiarities, officially accepted in grammar. 
Obviously, the most important peculiarity of aspects is the fact that they show how a situation or 
action occurs in the temporal context of the novel. By comparison, the lexical and semantic time are 
not so closely related to the basic objective meaning, but to the specific emotional colouring of the 
time occurring in the particular situation. As said by Kostas Aleksynas et al. (2001:263), in 
language, semantic time typically reflects the intentions, feelings, and emotions of the person, who 
uses this time in oral or written expression; whereas lexical time deals with the particular 
vocabulary items that the speaker or write uses in order to express his or her ideas. The three kinds 

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of time complement each other and sometimes it is even difficult to distinguish between them in a 
piece of literary work or in a longer speech. 
As can be seen from the evidence presented above, time is a dynamic ever changing and 
developing notion. The change of time is one of the main issues in literary works. Indeed, similarly 
to linguistic time, literary time can also be analyzed in many different ways. Every literary work is a 
representation of a particular historic period including social, political, cultural peculiarities of that 
time. Thus, Verdonk and Weber (1995) state that natural historic time influences the message that 
the writer wants to convey in his work, shapes the personal beliefs and values of the writer and, 
thus, shapes the form, style, and peculiarities of a literary work. A writer creates his own imaginary 
time as a boundary and direction of his work on the basis of which he portrays multidimensional 
personalities of his characters, their life, alterations in their mind, their relationships, conflicts, and 
problems. Stevenson, by comparison, claims (1998:93) that modernist narrative “is shaped and 
ruled by the randomness of memory’s ordering as much as by chronological sequence”. Baldic 
(1996:84) supports Stevenson, Verdonk and Weber’s ideas and complement them by adding that 
characters, especially in modern literature, usually conceal a mystical world in their mind that 
consists of interrelated time and space fragments. Thus, the reader also needs time to convey and to 
reflect on a particular text, which means that the process of reading is also temporally bounded. The 
ideas listed lead us to the claim that, undeniably, time is a wide and controversial issue that has 
received considerable attention in the works of linguists, philosophers, and scientists. 
Onega and Landa argue convincingly (1996:103) that “every work establishes its own time – 
norm and that there is a logical correlation between the amount of time devoted to an element and 
the degree of its aesthetic relevance or centrality.” In other words, a literary work is always 
spatially and temporally bounded, as it establishes certain relation between the amounts of time 
spared to the description of particular elements as it actually represents the historic, cultural, and 
ideological peculiarities of its historic period. The theorists (ibid.) enlarge their reflections on the 
notion of time in literature by claiming that time is a dimension, an object, and an indicator of detail 
selection, order, and relations of elements in a literary work. Every piece of literature is a kind of 
narrative, thus, logically; a narrative presents characters in action during a certain fictive period of 
time. The period is usually divided into different stages, or time sections, thus, the question of clear 
linearity remains problematic. According to Lee (1977:55), time in literature serves as a certain 
quantitative indicator that helps to measure and to understand the general tendency, or message, of 
the text and to clarify its particular shades of meaning. Indeed, there is a logical correlation between 
the amount of space devoted to a particular element and its centrality, or importance in the text. The 
reader always measures the importance of elements in the text on the basis of his subjective interest. 

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Typically, the most important details or events in a text are described in a great width, their spatial 
and temporal surroundings and circumstances are thoroughly indicated. The events that are believed 
not to carry great importance are portrayed briefly by means of general comments. However, 
sometimes in modernist narrative this traditional rule of informativity is purposefully violated in 
order to encourage the reader to think and reflect upon the material being read. For instance, the 
most important moments, or climaxes, in modernist fiction are usually not described at all, and all 
the reader learns about is the outcome of the particular event. Although this style of presenting 
events may seem a bit disappointing at the first glance, it gives more freedom for the reader’s 
imagination and strengthens his or her mental abilities such as creating hypotheses or making 
decisions. As a result, Lee believes (ibid.) that the consciously motivated reader may spend more 
time analyzing minor details than studying and calling into question and the most important 
elements.