PREPOSITION: THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES OF A SMALL PART OF SPEECH

The research of modern morphological image of preposition as a category is a burning issue for Russian grammar and lexicography as well as for applied disciplines such as teaching of Russian and machine translation. The purposes of the article are as follows: a comparison of recent lexicographic proceedings devoted to prepositions; a detection of main problems arising while studying the part of speech in question today and a quest for the ways of solving them. The comparison is based on the prepositional lists elicited from five dictionaries and special editions being published in the XXI century. The comparative analysis results have brought to light three key problems the Russian language researches deal with currently: the fuzziness of concept “preposition”, bias of prepositional categorization, diffuseness of borders between prepositions and adverbs.The authors suggest the following solutions for the stated problems:1) quest for the objective criteria to attribute linguistic units to prepositions as a part of speech;2) use of discrete terms to define the units of the kind;3) consideration of prepositional units within a functional grammatical field.