Analysis of one lexicographic case: the Russian noun svist ‘whistle’

The subject of the article is the application of the case study method to the description of lexical semantics, in particular, to the analysis of a dictionary entry. The author considers the Russian noun SVIST ‘whistle’ as an object, namely, its description in the “Dictionary of the Russian language” (1984). Semantic analysis shows that the description of the word polysemy in the dictionary does not correspond to the nature of the semantic representations that are assigned to this lexeme. The author offers his own version of the semantic description of this noun, in particular, using the category of image-schematic structure. Special attention is devoted to the problem of the dictionary presentation of syntactic representations, i.e. combinatory of the word.