Verbal Adjectives with Sequence Temporal Semantics in English

The issues of verbal time reference are studied by a number of Russian and foreign scientists. Although the aspects of structural and semantic features of non-verbal time markers isn’t extensively studied yet. This article is devoted to the issues of
non-verbal time reference. We examine English adjectives in adjective-noun structures sequence temporal meaning in the secondary adverbial function and in its primary noun-actant attributive function. The study analyses the verbal adjectives according to the relations between starting and referential moments at deep semantic level using the methodology for lexical syntactic reconstruction of
time markers, which is its turn based on the standard method of semantic primitive. We found out that the referential moment can be either explicit or implicit. In the latter case it can be restored by the method of semantic reconstruction. Moreover, having the feature of inner predicativeness, verbal adjectives can implement time sequence meaning of the hidden proposition involved into this word. Therefore, the mentioned structures can perform its primary syntactic function of noun-actant attributive.