Combinatorial Set of Lexico-Grammatical Classes of Nouns in the Russian Language

Abstract

The article focuses on the changes of nouns, the lexico-grammatical features of which make it impossible to refer them to a specific lexico-grammatical class. The article is based on the assumption, that traditional methodological foundations, generally accepted in native language studies – the grammatical classification, according to which nouns belong to one of the four classes: concrete, abstract, collective or material nouns, – is rather conventional and doesn't cover many transitional phenomena observed in substantive lexis. The expansion of nominal semantic structure is often accompanied by grammatical shifts. Semantic structures of Russian substantives are described as apt to undergo six types of changes, which reflect combinatorics of lexical and grammatical categories of polysemantic nouns: concreteness – abstractness, concreteness – collectiveness, abstractness – concreteness, abstractness – collectiveness, collectiveness – abstractness, collectiveness – concreteness. The considered polysemants demonstrate different lexico-grammatical features depending on the meaning in which they are used. The applied quantitative analysis has enabled the authors to conclude that the prevalent changes occur in nominal structures of abstraction – concreteness type, while the changes of collectivity – abstraction type are less prominent in the Russian language. The article justifies the use of the term "lexical-grammatical class" in relation to a lexical-semantic variant of the word, which refers to nouns by morphological characteristics.