Derivation and back-formation of prefixal suffixless nouns such as ‘забег, отсвет, поход, призыв ’. Unresolved issues

There are about two percent of suffixless nouns with prefixes in the Russian language. Over time, the ways of their formation and scope of use expanded. In the article, we attempted to interpret the formation of prefixal suffixless nouns without introducing the concept of zero morphemes. We have expanded the concept of back-formation, which well reveals the mechanism of word-formation of deverbal words such as призыв. This study has discussed the difficulties associated with the relative chronology of basewords and derived words, the historical alternation of vowels in the root, the potential nouns presented only in adverb form, as well as with the calquing words from Greek, and then from the Latin and new-European languages.