The system is against or against the system: Russian adverbial prepositions and other polyfunctional units

The article discusses Russian adverbial prepositions and the categorization of Russian prepositions within grammatical system. Adverbial prepositions listed in Russian Grammar (1980) are studied as a focus group. The author inspects the history of their selection and description in Russian grammars since 1755 up to modern grammars and lexicography works, mostly dictionaries of functional words. The paths of adverbial prepositions’ grammaticalization are described, and the origins of the preposition group in question are examined. The scrutinizing of the adverbial prepositions has brought up a model of different distribution for adverbial prepositions into primary, denominative and deadjectival classes. The further quantitative and lexicographic analysis has defined a group of polyfunctional units capable of functioning both as prepositions and adverbs - prototypic adverbial prepositions, which are considered as a core of the polyfunctional prepositions field. This field also includes “new” units marked in dictionaries as having two lexico-grammatical variants - an adverb and a preposition. The periphery of the field is occupied by units having an argument structure and marked in dictionaries of modern Russian as “in predicative meaning” and “parenthetical word”. Some adverbial prepositions, as it is shown, do not function as adverbs at all. The analysis reveals the discrepancies caused by the inclusion of adverbial prepositions as a class into the traditional classification of Russian prepositions. These discrepancies are produced by the mixture of different categorial bases - the functional one for adverbial prepositions and the derivative one for denominative and deverbative prepositions. The contradictions of the traditional prepositional classification and peculiarities of adverbial prepositions have led the author to an idea to propose an alternative module categorization of prepositions held on binary oppositions, which can be constructed in different ways according to the researcher’s aim. There have been identified three main independent bases for oppositions which cover all the prepositions - derivative, structural and functional. The remaining oppositions have a more narrow scope and are relevant for certain groups of prepositions. These oppositions are as follows: syntactic, paradigmatic, orthographic, semantic, functional-semantic and functional-categorial. The module categorization seems to be a coherent and noncontradictory mode to structure the functional-grammatical filed of Russian prepositions. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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