Zones and Taxis: Locative Semantics of Russian Cases in Terms of Modern Systems Linguistics

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the analysis of locative case semantics from the standpoint of modern system linguistics, in which case is interpreted as a formal grammatical category of a name that arose in Russian as a typical representative of inflecting languages in response to a functional query of the language system to provide compression and a formal content expression (predicative, logical) connectivity of the antiderivative text necessary for an exhaustive description of the event. Zones (or spheres) of an object are objectively existing structural elements of a person and a thing, the presence of which is especially pronounced when these persons or things become participants in an event, which in system linguistics is understood as a combination of genetically related phenomena that form a causal cycle. In a simple sentence, the main means of expressing taxis, interpreted as a chronology of the phenomena of subjects and objects participating in an event, are cases.