THE LEXICAL STATUS OF COMPOSITE PRONOUNS AND THEIR REPRESENTATION IN THE DICTIONARY

The author argues that an adequate lexicographic description largely lags behind the emergence of peripheral linguistic phenomena. On the other hand, dictionaries often draw attention to linguistic facts that have not yet received a certain status in linguistics. It is to such linguistic facts that «multiword» words, in particular combinations of words that are grammatical pronouns, adhere. The present article is devoted to the least studied phenomenon, namely the combination of the particle vot and interrogative pronouns, such as vot chto, vot pochemu, etc., in which the particle vot always bears a logical stress. The analysis showed that lexicalization and grammaticalization of these combinations is always related to the development of the parti- cle vot towards becoming an agglutinating prefix, which results in the transformation of an interrogative pronoun into a demonstrative one. Thus, the composite pronoun V´OT chto (V´OT chto ia skazhu [That's  what I’ll say]), when it is used as a word equivalent, is a demonstra- tive pronoun, whereas the word combination vot CHT´O? (Vot CHT´O ia skazhu? [Here is what I say?]) contains two separate words, the particle vot and the interrogative pronoun chto. The author indicates that combinations of the V´OT chto type form a system parallel to the system of traditional demonstrative pronouns, and that members of the former perform basic functions of pronouns, i. e. deictic and anaphoric, yet differ by the implementation of functions and the presence of new properties. The analysis of major explanatory dictionaries and dictionaries of the so-called “structural words” shows that these combinations are traditionally regarded as various meanings of the particle «vot». This is due to the lack of theoretical study of this phenomenon.