The concept of distance in the semantics of nouns

This paper is a semantic study of English nouns and adjectives representing the concept distance. The relevance of the study is due to the need to consider the phenomena of language in the perspective of the cognitive paradigm which seeks to connect language semantics with mental units that reflect the extralinguistic reality. In recent decades linguistics has turned to the study of the interaction between linguistic semantics and cognitive processes. The task of the linguist is to determine how our ideas about the world are refracted in the meanings of words as the nature of description and interpretation of reality is reflected in the organisation of the content side of language as a whole as well as its individual semantic areas. The way in which one of the universal categories of being and thinking is conceptualised and fixed in language is of undoubted interest both for linguistics and for the general theory of cognition. Space and time are basic categories of cognition of the world; they are objective infinite and inseparable. Distance is one of the immediate and indispensable components of the concept of space.