Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

3.1. The Linguistic and Literary Perspective of Time
 
Scientists have always claimed that the notion of time can be defined from various angles, 
namely: linguistically, semantically, scientifically, and literarily. Indeed, what is the difference 
between the linguistic and literary perspective of time? As Anna-Teresa Tymienecka states in her 
study (2007:56), linguistic perspective of time deals with the ways in which time is expressed in 
language. One way in which language encodes time relates to the range of linguistic phenomena of 
known as aspect. Linguistically, time can be seen as a wide abstract entity, while different aspects 
are responsible for relating to the way in which action is distributed through time, as encoded by 
language. Nevertheless, aspect is not a homogenous category, and even an individual language has 
a range of ways of encoding the distribution of action through time.
There are two major aspects related to the expression of time in language, namely: 
grammatical aspect and lexical aspect. Grammatical aspect characterizes the particular action or 
activity described in a situation and shows if that action is already completed, or continuing. 
Grammatical aspect manifests itself via the use of tenses in a language. Let us now have a look at 
the following extract from Woolf’s fiction: 
(18) But what she wished to get hold of was the very jar on the nerves, the thing 
itself before it has been made anything. (2006: 158) 
As seen in the quotation, Perfect tenses in Woolf’s novels are typically applied in order to 
indicate the completeness of the action, while Continuous or Perfect Continuous tenses typically 
indicate the duration of an activity. In other words, it is possible to say that activities expressed via 
Perfect tenses are temporarily bounded, or limited, while the activities described by means of 
Continuous tenses cover a wider scope of time and thus, are said to be relatively free as far as their 
temporality is concerned. I would like to foreground that in To the Lighthouse, Perfect tenses are 
use more often than the Simple ones, which, in my opinion, shows the writer’s choice to transcribe 
her characters’ minds in the form of temporal mosaic consisting of completed bits and pieces of 
experience. Although in the novel past, present, and future moments are intermingled and 
sometimes even difficult to recognize and to distinguish, each of them is from its own perspective 
finished and limited by the whole of the passing time. 
In addition to the grammatical aspect, we have to pay attention to the phenomenon of lexical 
aspect. Indeed, time both in language and in the chosen Woolf’s novel is expressed not only with 
the help of particular tenses, but it is also incorporated in the meaning of words. Linguistically, 
words have different denotative and connotative meaning, and notions related to time and 
temporality should not be considered as an exception. In his research, Sanders (1994:245) reveals 

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that temporal experiences are complex, multifaceted, and subjectively real, which is to say directly 
experienced. For instance, such verbs as “like, love, hate, seem” express long lasting states, while 
the words “open, explode, fall” are typically chosen to speak bout short, sudden, or unexpected 
actions which do not last long. As can be seen from the following short examples from the novel 
(1927), the lexical aspect of linguistic time is closely related to the semantic side of the word as it 
denotes the meaning of a lexical item by indicating the type of action it characterizes: 
(19) At the same time, she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs Ramsay on the beach… as