Jakobson's Theory Of Taxis In Russia

Taxis is a functional grammatical category, referring to a sequence and interdependence of events in a sentence. The most important indicator of this grammatical category is a combination of two or more verbal forms in the sentence. The combination of the verbal forms needs to satisfy several conditions. The category is represented by morphological, syntactic or lexical language units. Semantics of taxis expresses relations of different actions in the time period (simultaneity, antecedence and following). Thus, an utterance with the taxis construction expresses two or more propositions. The proposition includes a predicate and its arguments. Participants (agents) of the different propositions in the taxis construction do not necessarily match.

The category is involved in the description of several exotic languages (Andrason 2016). Linguists develop Jakobson's theory of taxis especially in Russia. Rich morphology of Russian verb generates basis for deep analysis of the category. Taxis is considered in two aspects. Firstly, as a grammatical category, dealing with the verb morphology. As a morphological category taxis includes relative tenses and infinite forms (gerund, participles). Secondly, as a functional grammatical category with field structure, based on the specific function of the linguistic units; taxis is regarded as an analogue of semantic field with its center and periphery. The ground of the field is the function of its components to express sequence, consequence and interdependence of different events in the period of time. The field includes morphological categories, infinite forms, verbal nouns, syntactic constructions and clauses, specific conjunctions. Temporal adverbs and phrases are widely used in taxis constructions. Relative (dependent ) taxis involves dominant and subordinate actions, the independent one – several equal actions (like Vini, vidi, vici). The chain of verbs and their derivatives represents taxis construction in the utterance, when (a) every form denotes a proposition of its own, (b) localization of the proposition in the period of time is determined by another proposition,

The latter is equal to the moment of speech for absolute tenses (Reichenbach 1947). As for relative tenses, each of them is a tool to localize the event in the period of time in relation to another event, which becomes a reference point. Thanks to Reichenbach, the interdependence between the time of speech act and the time of event was unified by defining all of the tenses in terms of the “middle term”, the reference point. Meanwhile, the reference point becomes the term to describe interrelations between tense and verb aspect. The relationship between the time of the speech act and the reference point identifies the tense, while the time of the event and the reference point correlation identifies the aspect. Some of the contemporary scholars prefer a mixed temporal/aspectual analysis, based on the three-dimentional coordinate system: the time of the speech act, the time of the event, the reference point (Binnick 2012). Nevertheless, tense and aspect are distinguished syntactically and semantically: tense deals with locating the event in time, while aspect deals with the internal temporal structure of the event. In other words, tense is an exterior characteristic of the event, while aspect is its interior characteristic. Actually, this statement corresponds to Guillaume's distinction between the time containing the