Ways of verbalizing aspectual and taxis situations in Soviet children's graphic stories about clever Masha

The paper discusses the aspectual and taxis situations, as well as the related situations of temporal localization in the graphic stories about Clever Masha published in soviet children's magazine Chizh (Siskin) between 1934 and 1937. Syntactic and pragmatic approaches to the material enable to demonstrate how the ways of storyline verbalization based on the mono- and polysubject independent taxis were changing in the process of forming the rules of graphic stories as a genre, and how the texts correlate with the communication abilities of children. As a result of gradual creolization of graphic stories, texts ceased to be used as a way of filling the storyline gaps, which means reducing the amount of aspectual and taxis situations, replacing them with non-taxis situations complicated with different types of modality, and refusing to use the markers of temporal delimitation and markers of situations of temporal localization / non-localization (or extending temporal limits of taxis situations with the help of such markers). Consequently, the verbal level оf the stories becomes non-coherent with the visual one and has little in common with the iconic and representative type of the children's discourse, which makes the whole structure of graphic stories more complicated and narratively flexible, and helps to improve the communicative competence of a child.