Vocativity as dictionary and pragmatic characteristic of a word

The article presents semantic and pragmatic characteristics that must be taken into account in vocabulary recording of the vocatives. An ideographic dictionary entry should reflect the word’s vocative function as communicative pragmatic properties. The word’s ability to be used as a direct address is conditioned by its semantic and pragmatic class. The use of the ideographic dictionaries’ data helps to distinguish the word classes that lexicalized their syntactic function of vocativity. The use of corpus data permits to monitor the dynamics of the vocatives’ usage. It is also necessary to indicate special grammatical properties of lexical units used as vocatives. It is important to include illustrative examples of vocative use of words into the dictionary entries for learners of Russian as a foreign language.