The grammar of Russian preposition: theoretical aspects

At present, linguists do not have sufficient tools to strictly determine whether specific prepositional units belong to prepositions as a part of speech, so it seems relevant to consider the functional-grammatical field of prepositions, which includes both prepositions themselves and units that can function as prepositions. The aim of this article is to identify, classify and describe systemic paradigmatic relations within the functional-grammatical field of prepositions. The study was conducted on the material of a registry of 3,000 prepositional units, which were collected through a continuous sampling from dictionaries and specialized works, as well as by identifying all possible variants of prepositions on the Internet and the National Corpus of the Russian language. The paradigmatic relations of the units that already have lexicographic attribution were analyzed. As a result, the graphical, morphonological and word-formation paradigms of prepositional units were identified, and their morphosyntactic and semantic paradigmatic relations were detailed. The graphical paradigm is a series of variants of different types: alphabetic, written together or separately and uncodified. The morphological paradigm includes vocalized, accented, incomplete-vowel versions, truncated, softened, differentiated by accent and inflective variants. Within the word-formation paradigm the most productive roots of prepositional units are identified. For the morphosyntactic paradigm, the possible structural subtypes were identified: thus, the form of the prepositional noun and the form of the introduced actant were relevant. In addition, the regularities of paradigm formation were revealed for prepositional units expressing different types of semantic relations. For the semantic paradigm, the dependence of a particular paradigm subtype on the type of semantic relations expressed by the prepositional units has been revealed. Considering the functional and grammatical field of the preposition as a set organized by regular relations of different types, we can identify the grammar of the preposition. Understanding the systemic relations between prepositional units opens the way to predicting systematically possible linguistic units within the field in question.