Linguistic Means of Expressing Time in a Historical Narrative (based on the Material of Russian Textbooks on the History of China)
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The article is devoted to one of the central problems of the verbal design of the historical narrative — the expression of the category of time in it. Since the historical narrative implies not just a message about the chronological sequence or simultaneity of events, but contains their “narrative understanding”, “intrigue” (P. Ricœur), purposeful organization of facts by the author of the text, linguistic means of expressing time play an important role in it. This role goes beyond the functioning of 4 microfields of the category of temporality (temporality, frequency, sequence and duration). Based on the texts of Russian textbooks on the history of China for universities, we show that the lexical means of expressing time in a historical text form a narrative intrigue both in a dictum plan, allowing the author to vary the dynamics of action and change the points of reference and the direction of view of events, and in a modus plan, interacting with the category of the subject interpreting history from a synchronous and diachronic point of view. The textbook texts were subjected to automated frequency and manual contextual analysis, which made it possible to identify both the features of the functioning of individual units and the general principles of their use for the implementation of a narrative strategy. Demonstrating the general principles of building a historical narrative, the texts of textbooks on the history of China also have a certain specificity of using linguistic means of expressing time, due to the antiquity of Chinese civilization and the division of Chinese history into periods. In addition, through the prism of the analysis of linguistic design, we have shown that not only history as a whole is a construct, but also a separate event, starting with its isolation in the flow of time and ending with the establishment of its internal “intrigue”.
Authors: Marina Sidorova, Li Guanyao
Institution: Lomonosov Moscow State University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410955858