Functional words: problem areas yesterday, today and tomorrow

The paper presents an attempt to briefly outline the history of ideas and methods in functional words’ (FWs) studies in Russian linguistics from Lomonosov’s “Russian Grammar” up to now. In the Introduction the properties of FWs that led to their singling out into a special category are described in connection with their numerous synonyms. At the same time, we emphasize the fuzziness of this category. In the main body of the article, we characterize three stages in the history of FWs’ study. At the first stage, FWs were considered, first of all, in the context of the problem of parts of speech. At the second stage, when formal models of language appeared, the semantics of specific FWs became the focus of attention, and the concept of their syntactic and semantic scope entered the framework of their description. At the third stage, thanks to the creation of the Russian National Corpus, work began on the creation of multidimensional electronic resources (dictionaries and databases) of different types of Russian FWs. In them, on the one hand, the verified information on the structure, semantic and syntactic properties of FWs, obtained at the previous stages, is collected, and on the other hand, оn their basis, further research is being conducted to address a variety of theoretical and applied problems and to fill the gaps in the description of FWs.