Lexicographic Description of Old Russian Set Combinations of Words (On the Material of Verb Phrases)

The aim of the article is to discuss the prospects of creating a special dictionary of old Russian set combinations of words. This dictionary would fill the existing gap in the number of hundreds of lexicographic descriptions of phraseological expressions of the modern Russian language, as well as one dictionary of the 18th century and a phraseological dictionary of the old Slavic language. The article analyzes the nominations scientists used since the 19th century to designate set combinations of words in diachrony (invariant expressions, hardened combinations of words, formulas, etc.). The author proposes the term “syncretemes” speaking about the peculiarities of the mentality of ancient times that determine the differences of these units from modern phraseology (from syncretism as a non-dismemberment of sensual contemplation and abstract thinking activities). The article reports about the experience the author accumulated in the lexicographic description of some types of syncretemes-paired names, set comparisons, phrases with instrumental case in the meaning of restriction. The article analyzes the set combinations of words with a verb core component (such as vzyati rat’). 380 such units, extracted by the continuous sampling method from 526 contexts of written monuments, were identified. The author considers the structure of these units built according to the following models: (a) productive and frequent “verb + noun₄” (vzyat’ volyu); (b) unproductive “verb + noun₅” (biti chelom), “verb + noun₃” (razumeti knigam), etc. The author focuses attention on the feature of syncretic semantics of these syncretemes: action directed at the object, which is simultaneously its result. The feature manifests itself in the conditional “split” of the denotate (‘pobedit’ ’ - vzyati pobedu). The author compares the fixation of set verb phrases in the historical dictionaries of the 19th-21st centuries, pointing to the following changes: (1) the use of illustrative examples; (2) undifferentiated emphasis in the dictionary; (3) the separation of these units into set combinations of words and phraseological units with a motivated meaning. According to the author, such a differentiation, which is based on the criterion of the degree of the semantic cohesion of the components, is not quite correct in relation to the old Russian material because it has no objective algorithms and is based on modern researchers’ feeling for language. The author proposes to take into account more objective criteria-frequency and productivity of set verb phrases in old Russian texts. In the conclusion, it is indicated that the lexicographic description of set combinations of words requires solving a number of problems related to the algorithm of detecting these units, to the criteria of separating them from free combinations of words, to the principles of locating them in the historical dictionary, to the peculiarities of presenting their semantics and structure.

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