Predicative in the Russian language of the XIX century

The paper aims at giving an overview of the main semantic and grammatical problems of the predicatives in the context of the diachronic dynamics in the Russian language of the 19th century. Some aspects of predicatives, as well as issues of class expanding in the given period are considered in detail. The paper proposes a systematic diachronic approach which allows to solve the problem of predicatives as a class of words in Russian, forming the methodology for complex derivational analysis of predicative units from the standpoint of diachronic linguistics. The research is based on lexicographic and corpus data. The paper describes the main patterns of semantic-grammatical drift within the given class of words during the 19th century. The analysis specifies lexico-semantic, word-formational, morphological and syntactic status of predicative units of various structural types.