To the origins of historical phraseography: Stable compound complexes in “Materials for the dictionary of the Old Russian language” by I. I. Sreznevsky

Abstract

The article is devoted to the scientific heritage of I. I. Sreznevsky in connection with actively developing now historical phraseology and historical phraseography, the urgent problem of which is creation of the phraseological dictionaries of the language of pre-national period. The purpose of the paper is to study the retrospective of Russian and Slavonic historical phraseography, so it deals with the systematical and full research of stable compound complexes that have become the subject of description in Sreznevsky’s “Materials for the Dictionary of Old Russian language”, techniques and methods of their lexicographic interpretation, as well as the theoretical position of Sreznevsky as a lexicographer and one of founders of Russian phraseology. It is concluded that in the history of lexicography a bright representative of Petersburg Philological school Sreznevsky not only created the first historical dictionary of Old Russian texts, but also put the base of historical phraseography, since his dictionary is the first experience of describing the diachronic state of phraseology. The study of stable complexes presented in Sreznevsky’s dictionary, fulfiled with methods of phraseological identification, component, grammatical and lexicographic definitions analysis within general historical and systematic approaches, showed variety of linguistic material: idiomatics, traditional formulas, equivalents of Greek words, stable prepositional combinations, complex terms and names, compound proper names, proverbial expressions. Their interpretation outlines principles of lexicographic description of stable combinations in a historic dictionary and identifies important controversial issues (phraseology selection and explanation, the combination of linguistic and encyclopedic approaches, the representation of variability and synonymy of phraseology, the place of phraseology in a dictionary entry, etc.).