Russian 3rd person possessive pronouns in the explanatory dictionary

One of the principles underlying the Active Dictionary of the Russian language is the adherence to the lexicographical tradition, which means either the use of existing viewpoints or the motivated deviation from them. Words ego ‘his/its,’ ee ‘her,’ ikh ‘their’ in the possessive meaning (ego dom ‘his house,’ ee puteshestvie ‘her journey,’ ikh sem’ya ‘their family’) are treated differently in dictionaries, grammatical descriptions and linguistic studies. The article discusses the arguments presented in the literature in favor of distinguishing between two series of homonymous units: separate possessive pronouns ego, ee, ikh and forms of the genitive case of personal pronouns on/ ono ‘he/it,’ ona ‘she,’ oni ‘they.’ The former are similar to the possessive pronouns moi ‘mine,’ tvoi ‘yours,’ nash ‘ours,’ vash ‘yours,’ and the latter to the forms of the genitive case of other personal pronouns. Consequently, ego, ee, ikh in the possessive meaning should be described in separate dictionary entries. Possessive pronouns ego, ee, ikh are always governed by nouns, however, they do not behave in this position in the same way: for example, there are some peculiarities when they refer to an object of some action (e.g. ego izuchenie lit. ‘study of him/it ’). Such features should be noted in the corresponding section of dictionary entry. The article attempts to show that the pronouns in question have only one very general meaning ‘relating to,’ similar to the meaning of possessive adjectives with which they are included in the same lexicographic type. The specific semantic relations in the collocation including a noun and a possessive pronoun depend both on the semantics of this noun and on the context in which this collocation is used. Such relations should be described in a special section of the dictionary entry where collocations are collected and cannot serve as the basis for claiming that the possessive pronouns ego, ee, ikh have more than one meaning.