THE ENIGMATIC POLYSEMY OF RUSSIAN KROME

The article discusses the course of semantic derivation which links together the two meanings of the Russian preposition krome: krome 1 ‘except for’ and krome 2 ‘in addition to’. The paper demonstrates that in both cases, krome X introduces a boundary separating object X from other objects based on some criterion. Krome 1 draws a boundary between objects that have the property in question and those that do not have it, whereaskrome 2 draws a boundary between objects that are already known to have this property and those that are declared to have it Thus, the semantic shift consists in the transferral of the boundary from the descriptive domain to the communicative one.