Verbal grammar in the Russian explanatory dictionary

Abstract

The subject of the present paper are interactions of the lexical senses of Russian verbs (a) with the grammatical forms of aspect, tense, voice, mood and the like and (b) with the meanings of certain grammemes (such as IMPERF) in cases of their polysemy. An instance of the latter are constraints imposed by the given lexical sense of a verb on the possibility of its use in certain aspectual meanings (progressive, praesens historicum and the like). The focal point of the paper are non-trivial, i.e. lexicalized interactions. Dictionary is the only place where such interactions can be described exhaustively, yet they are completely ignored in most authoritative explanatory dictionaries of Russian. All such interactions are broken into two large groups - paradigmatic (like the ones pointed out in (a) and (b)) and syntagmatic. In the latter group aspect turns out to be the most active grammatical category capable of multifarious interactions with a number of syntactic phenomena, especially with various syntactic forms of implementing the verb's semantic actants, and also with such contextual factors as modality, negation, and parenthesis.