EXPERIENCE OF COMPARISON OF APPROACHES TO THE DISTIGUISHING OF GRAMMATICAL CLASSES OF WORDS AND GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

Several alternative approaches to the definition of grammatical words classes and grammatical categories in Russian are compared in the article. The main ideas of the neostructuralist approach are compared with other concepts:

(a) the “canonical” point of view of modern Russian studies;
(b) different versions of “traditional” theories;
(c) the “formal grammar school” of the 1920s;
(d) the conception of A. A. Zaliznyak and other grammarians of the 20th century. The introduction considers the following dichotomies:

(1) grammar of spoken vs. written language;
(2) morphology vs. syntax;
(3) synthetism vs. grammatical analyticism: “narrowly formal” vs. “extended formal”

interpretation;
(4) “inflectional” vs. “agglutinative” morphology;
(5) “inflection” vs. “word formation”.
Section I considers dichotomies that make up the logical basis of the neo-structuralist approach to grammatical description (in comparison mainly with the conception of A. A. Zaliznyak):

(0) different approaches (vocabulary vs. corpus) to compiling “source material”; (1) nominative vs. syntactical elements of meaning;
(2) regular (synthetic) vs. extended paradigms;
(3) inflectional vs. classifying grammatical categories.

When discussing the third dichotomy, the neo-structuralist approach is also compared with A. V. Bondarko’s concept of degrees of correlation. In addition to

(a) a dichotomy (binary division) between “correlation” vs. “non-correlativeness”, he suggested introducing more detailed subdivisions:
(b) “consistent” vs. “inconsistent” correlation and
(c) three degrees of “lexical conditioning of the paradigm”:

(c′) the “lexically unconditioned paradigm”,
(c′′) “partial lexical conditioning of the paradigm”, and
(c′′′) “a high degree of lexical conditioning of the paradigm”.
The concepts of degrees of correlation allow for projection onto two additional areas:

(1) the opposition of lexical and grammatical categories; (2) the opposition of syntactic forms that make up the “formal-structural concordant side” of lexical-grammatical categories.

Within the neo-structuralist approach, there is (I) compatibility of so-called “non-correlativeness” (actually minimal correlation) with the existence of minimal pairs that form grammatical oppositions; (II) compatibility of the so-called “consistent correlation” with the lexicalization of grammemes.