THE VERBAL PREFIX — BETWEEN GRAMMAR AND DICTIONARY: A DICTIONARY SOLUTION EXEMPLIFIED BY THE RUSSIAN VERBAL PREFIX VZ

 Taking as a starting point existing attempts in grammars, morpheme dictionaries, and special studies to describe the Russian verbal affixes with the component VZ- (VZO-, VS-, VSO-), this article presents a lexicographic type of description in a format close to the format adopted by the Active Dictionary of the Russian Language (cf. Apresyan, Yu. D. [On the Active Dictionary of the Russian Language]. Aktivnyy slovar' russkogo yazyka. Tom 1, A-B [Active Dictionary of the Russian Language. Volume 1, A-B]. Moscow, Languages of Slavic Culture Publ., 2014, pp. 5–36. (In Russ.)). The resulting dictionary entries for eleven affixes containing the component VZ- are grouped into three homonymous morphemic blocks. In a second step, the semantic definitions of these morphemes are compared with elements that make up part of the semantic definition of Russian verbs with the component VZ- featured in the Active Dictionary of the Russian Language (Aktivnyy slovar' russkogo yazyk. Tom 2, V-G [Active Dictionary of the Russian language. Volume 2. V-G]. Moscow, Languages of Slavic Culture Publ., 2014). In total, 63 verbal lexemes are considered. The paper contains a number of refinements relating to the information on morphemes given in the academic Grammar of the Russian Language (Russkaya grammatika. Tom 1: Fonetika, Slovoobrazovaniye. Morfologiya [Russian grammar. Volume 1: Phonetics, Word Formation. Morphology]. Moscow, Nauka Publ., 1980) and includes a table showing the relations between semantic definitions of the affix morphemes and semantic definitions of the verbal lexemes in the format employed by the Active Dictionary of the Russian Language.