BIVALENCE OF TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL PREPOSITIONS IN PRESENT DAY ENGLISH

Abstract

The paper is focused on the notion of bivalence of temporal and spatial prepositions, which comprises functionalsemantic, discursive and structural ties, which exist between preposition, its complement and dependent. In the course of the research it has been discovered that a traditional right-hand valence does not define a lexical unit as a preposition, in particular at the level of sentence or discourse. A complement, which is a center of the deictic temporal and space scale, is determined not by a preposition itself, but by its dependent element – discursive or lexical. Any prepositional complement is specified by an author’s intention and a dependent element. Three types of prepositional complement have been distinguished – noun phrase, clausal and null complements.