Typology of Taxis Constructions

Viktor S. Xrakovskij (ed.)

Russian Academy of Sciences

This collective volume by the Language Typology Workshop of the St. Petersburg Institute for Linguistic Studies (Russian Academy of Sciences) addresses taxis (relative tense) constructions in languages of different structure. It continues the Workshop’s earlier studies under a general research program launched in the 1960s and focused on the grammatical verb categories related to the semantic and syntactic structure of the sentence. The Workshop’s earlier publications in English include: Nedjalkov V. P. (ed.). Typology of Resultative Constructions. Amsterdam, 1988; Xrakovskij V. S. (ed.). Typology of Iterative Constructions, LINCOM, München, 1997; Xrakovskij V. S. (ed.). Typology of Imperative Constructions. LINCOM München, 2001; Xrakovskij V. S. (ed.). Typology of Conditional Constructions. LINCOM, München, 2005; Nedjalkov V. P. (ed.). Reciprocal Constructions. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, 2007; and Xrakovskij V. S. (ed.). Typology of Concessive Constructions. LINCOM, München, 2012. This volume consists of two parts and an appendix.

Part 1 provides a background on taxis studies and sets forth the underlying theoretical concept. The proposed theoretical concept makes it possible to describe taxis constructions in a form that allows to demonstrate both their common (above all, semantic) properties and typological (above all, grammatical) differences between both related and unrelated languages. The concept establishes a typology of taxis verb forms, provides a characterization of prototypical and peripheral taxis constructions, and proposes calculi for taxis meanings and taxis constructions.

Part 2 consists of two sections and 20 chapters on taxis constructions in various languages. The descriptions are to a large extent uniform as they are based on a common questionnaire.

The contributors to this collective volume are: Alpatov V. M., Barentsen A. (Netherlands),  Bystrov I. S. , Dmitrenko S. Yu., Ibragimov I. I., Iskhakova X. F., Kordi E. E. , Kramarova S. G., Malchukov A. L., Nasilov D. M., Nedjalkov I. V., Nevskaya I. A.,   Nicolova R. (Bulgaria), Nikitina T. N., Nikitina T. V., Ogloblin A. K., Orosz A. (Hungary), Spatari N. M., Stankevich N. V., Tommola H.  (Finland), Wiemer B.  (Germany), Xrakovskij V. S., and Zorikhina-Nilsson N. (Sweden).

ISBN 9783862887224 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 58. 710pp. 2016.