Despite the fact that the number of scientific papers devoted to Russian pronouns is constantly growing, this class of words is still quite "difficult" for researchers, compilers of explanatory dictionaries, and teachers and teachers. Most often, disputes between scientists arise in connection with the solution of two main issues. The first one concerns the nature of the lexical meaning of pronouns. Some researchers consider it completely abstract, others, on the contrary, absolutely concrete, and still others say that the pronoun has no lexical meaning, about the "grammatical" nature of the meaning of pronouns.

The second question, which is closely related to the first one , is about the position of pronouns in the system of parts of speech of the Russian language. In some cases (in particular, in the school grammatical tradition), the pronoun is considered one of the significant (independent) parts of speech, in others - it is referred to as "semi - significant" vocabulary or even official words, in others-the pronoun is generally denied the status of a special part of speech and pronominal words are distributed according to different lexical and grammatical categories.

From time to time, the scientific literature revives the opinion about the "formality" of the pronoun, about the proximity of pronouns to service words, and about the lack of lexical meaning for words of this class. (We will refer to the works of: Buslaev F. I. Historical grammar of the Russian language, Moscow, 1959; Ovsyaniko Kulikovsky D. N. Syntax of the Russian language, St. Petersburg, 1902; Shakhmatov A. A. Syntax of the Russian language, L., 1941; Tenier L. Osnovy strukturnogo sintaksa [Fundamentals of structural syntax], Moscow, 1988; Katsnelson S. D. Word content, meaning and designation, Moscow-L., 1965; Zhirmunsky V. M. O prirode chaste rechi i ikh klassifikatsii // Voprosy teorii chast ' rechi na materiale yazykov razlichnykh tipov [Issues of the theory of parts of speech based on the material of languages of various types]. L., 1968; Yakobson P. O. Shifteri, glagol'nye kategorii i russkiy glagol [Shifters, verbal categories and the Russian verb]. // Essays on phonology, Morphonology and Morphology, Moscow, 1979). The reason for the revival of such ideas, as a rule, is the consideration of pronouns not from morphological positions, but from the point of view of syntax.

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An important place in syntactic theories is occupied by questions of correlation of what is reported with the communication situation. Therefore, the ability of pronouns to act as a "technical" means to indicate facts of reality that are either already in the field of view of the speaker and listener, or should be included in this general field of view, is in demand in this case. In their function, pronouns are close to those components of the grammatical meaning of the verb, which are designed to express the syntactic category of predicativity, to establish the relation of the reported to the situation of speech. This feature of pronouns gives scientists a reason to talk about the" formality"," grammatical "or" technical " nature of the pronominal meaning. A. A. Reformatsky's characteristic of pronouns is typical: "Pronouns are words-indications, they do not mean, but indicate what is significant. ...Pronouns are situational words, i.e. their meaning is determined by knowing the situation of speech;

if the interlocutor knows who is talking, to whom he is talking, where he is talking and when he is talking (as well as what happened before this conversation and as a result of which this conversation arose), then he will be able to really understand the sentence I'm telling you this now (Reformatsky A. A. Introduction to Linguistics, Moscow, 1967. pp. 59-60). In this regard, pronouns are often characterized as" empty"," meaningless "words that" do not name anything"," do not characterize anything", the meaning of which is completely determined by the communication situation. What is it? In different situations, the pronoun will denote completely different objects and phenomena.

The "situational" nature of a pronominal meaning is sometimes understood too broadly. The fact is that the meaning of many words is characterized by relativity: without knowing the situation, it is impossible to fully understand the meaning of such words as left, ahead, appear, appear, father, sister, leader. Such words require clarification, "in relation to whom or to what", which gives rise to some researchers to talk about the" pronominal", that is, pronominal nature of the meanings of such words. This is hardly true, since the meaning of pronouns requires taking into account only the positions of the speaker and the addressee of speech, the meaning of" relative "words implies taking into account the position of the observer (Apresyan Yu. D. Selected works, vol. 1. Lexical Semantics, Moscow: School "Languages of Russian Culture", 1995. pp. 68-69; Arutyunova N.Istoki, problemy i kategorii pragmatiki [Sources, problems and categories of pragmatics]. Novoe v zarubezhnoi lingvistike [New in Foreign Linguistics], Moscow: Progress, 1985. 16. Pragmatika, p. 16), in relation to which the "coordinate system" of what is reported in the utterance is constructed.

Since pronouns are characterized as "incomplete" words, the reason for expanding the class of pronominal words can also be a "weakening of the meaning" of significant words. So,

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L. I. Ushakova refers to the number of pronouns, in particular, the words "due - to the category of demonstratives; other, the rest - to the category of determinants" (Ushakova L. I. Pronouns and their analogues / / Russian language at school. 1998. N 1. Pp. 86-90).

The characterization of the pronominal meaning as a formal, purely situational one naturally leads researchers to exclude pronouns from the number of significant words. E. N. Sidorenko's remark is significant: "With the help of various kinds of constitutive concretizers, in some cases it is possible to achieve a false effect of acquiring a lexical meaning by a pronoun, but in fact this meaning is variable, it is not assigned to this sound complex, it depends on the context, situation ... therefore, it does not switch the word from the pronominal vocabulary to the full-significant one, which has a nominative meaning" (Sidorenko E. P. Essays on the theory of pronouns of the modern Russian language. Odessa, 1990, p. 13).

Indeed, the meaning of pronouns is very different from the meaning of "nominative" words (noun, adjective, numeral, adverb, verb). However, this, as will be shown later, is not a reason to exclude the pronoun from the number of significant parts of speech.

A completely opposite point of view on the pronoun is held by proponents of another theory, who consider pronominal words as equivalents ("substitutes") of nouns, adjectives, numerals, and adverbs. In particular, R. A. Budagov wrote about the substitutive role of pronouns: "The" substitutive " function is widely developed in pronouns, personal pronouns can act instead of nouns ( he is a friend-enemy-relative, etc.), possessive and demonstrative-instead of adjectives ( my book-that book - a good book), quantitative pronouns - instead of numerals" (Budagov R. A. Introduction to the science of language, p. 300). This view of the pronoun is very old, it goes back to the ancient grammatical tradition, which is reflected in the word pronoun itself (tracing paper from Latin rhopomep).

The parallelism between pronouns and non-noun words is obvious. However, if we compare these two types of words exclusively from formal grammatical positions, that is, from the point of view of inflection features, word formation, syntactic compatibility, it is easy to come to the conclusion that between the pronouns who, someone, nothing and nouns, between what, each, other and adjectives, how many, several and numerals, where, there are no fundamental differences between there, here, and adverbs at all. Thus, V. V. Vinogradov believed that only some pronominal nouns are actually pronouns. He noted that "if all pronouns are collected in one class, then the integrity of the system of parts of speech will be violated: in the class there is a place-

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words of different grammatical nature will appear on the estates" (Vinogradov V. V. Russian language (Grammatical teaching about the word). Moscow, 1986, p. 268). On this basis, proponents of the formal-grammatical approach to language learning, as a rule, distribute pronouns according to different lexical and grammatical categories, denying this category of words the status of a special part of speech.

Interestingly, seeing the parallelism of pronouns with names and adverbs, scientists have repeatedly tried to find "pronominal verbs"in the Russian language. For their role, the verbs to be, to exist, combinations of what to do, what to do, and even the word that were suggested at different times.

It is quite natural that when considering pronouns from a formal grammatical point of view, their meaning is perceived as the most abstract, generalized. Moving from words with a concrete meaning to more and more abstract vocabulary, the researcher eventually "rests" on the pronoun: birch-tree-plant-object-what.

The characterization of the pronominal meaning as "abstract" is quite common in works on the pronoun. According to K. A. Levkovskaya, " the peculiarity of pronouns... it consists in the fact that they express very abstract concepts" (Levkovskaya K. A. Word theory, principles of its construction and aspects of studying lexical material, Moscow, 1962, p. 185).

N. Y. Shvedova also considers the meaning of pronouns to be as abstract as possible: "The system of pronouns covers the most general concepts, which then receive various, hierarchically organized names in the vocabulary, are formalized in grammar and morphemics, and are designated by connecting and qualifying words. ... By the level of abstraction, this system stands above all other classes of words: it makes sense of their structure and their mutual connections. The class of pronouns is an arsenal of semantic abstractions contained in the language as a whole; this determines the role of pronouns in the system of other word classes " (Shvedova N. Yu. Pronoun and meaning. Class of Russian pronouns and semantic spaces opened by them, Moscow, 1998, p. 8).

N. Y. Shvedova speaks about the correspondence of pronouns not only to names and adverbs, but also to many other units of the language, for example, " the semantic space of a pronoun as... It is open to a wide variety of linguistic means: it is filled with adverbs, cases and prepositional forms, adverbial participles, and very often - the whole utterance or response of the dialogue " (Ibid., p. 149). N. Yu. Shvedova proceeds not from the form of language units, but from their lexical and grammatical semantics, without distinguishing between them. these two kinds of meanings are rather combining them in the concept of "meaning". As you can see, " purely sma-

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the " word "approach gives almost the same result as the"purely grammatical" one.

Researchers who consider the pronominal meaning "as abstract as possible", as well as those who consider it "absolutely concrete", tend to unnecessarily expand the class of pronominal words. In this case, the reason for including a word in the number of pronouns (or recognizing it as similar to a pronoun) is the abstractness of its meaning. Thus, N. Y. Shvedova gives a list of words with "blurred", "semi-semistiminal" semantics: people, person, people, business, thing, now, once, long ago, and also gives a list of "deictic", that is, indicative verbs: to be, to become, to do, to happen, etc. If you follow this path to the end, then you will have to include all the philosophical terminology in the number of pronouns. One can hardly agree with this.

What is the essence of the pronominal meaning? In our opinion, the closest approach to the answer to this question was made by scientists who showed that the meaning of pronouns is a lexical meaning of a special kind: not nominative, but demonstrative (Let's name some works: Potebnya A. A. From notes on Russian Grammar, Vol. 1, 2. Moscow, 1958; Shakhmatov A. A. Syntax of the Russian language Zaretsky A. I. O pronoimenii [On pronouns]. Russkiy yazyk v shkole [Russian language at school]. 1940. N 6; Wolf E. M. Grammatika i semantika pronomeniy [Grammar and semantics of pronouns], Moscow, 1974; Malovitsky L. Ya. Nominativnoe i deikticheskoe znachenie [Nominative and deictic meaning]. Tartu, 1986).

A. A. Potebnya contrasted pronouns with other significant words on the basis that " pronouns... denote... phenomena and perceptions not by means of a sign taken from the circle of perceptions themselves, but by means of relations to the speaker, that is, not qualitatively, but pointedly... The pronoun marks perceptions with an indication, that is, relative to the speaker... "(Potebnya A. A. Decree. op.). The same idea in the interpretation of M. A. Shelyakin looks like this: "Pronouns, unlike nominative words, do not express the qualitative definiteness of homogeneous objects, by which they are distinguished and identified (cf.axe, table, wall, floor, etc.), but distinguish heterogeneous objects on the basis of correlation with the speaking person. This method of designating objects is called the method of indicating-deixis, and the signs themselves - deiktic " (Shelyakin M. A. Decree. op.).

Demonstrative pronouns should be understood not literally (only demonstrative pronouns are indicative in the literal sense), but in the sense that "the pronoun does not name this or that, but" hints" at this or that " (Zaretsky A. I. Decree. op.). The instruction consists in " selecting an object of speech from a group of similar ones at the time of speech about it (with a focus on the speaker) "(Bolshova Yu. V. Spe-

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grammar of pronominal meaning / / Zeszyty naukowe Uniw. Lodzskiego. Ser. 1. Lodz, 1977. N 16).

Simply put, a pronoun indicates that the subject of speech is included in some set of objects known (sometimes hypothetically known) to the speaker and listener, and also tells how this object can be detected.

So, for example, demonstrative pronouns assume that the "initial set" (S. A. Krylov's term: Krylov S. A. Name determination in Russian: theoretical problems // Semiotika i informatika [Semiotics and Informatics], Moscow, 1984. 23) is in the general" field of view " of the speaker and listener, and determinative pronouns - that it is a well-known class of objects. The selection (or "identification") of the desired item can occur in different ways. For example, the demonstrative pronouns this, such, and that suggest the identification of the desired object and the "original set". This identification has different bases for different pronouns.

The pronoun this indicates the coincidence of the original set and the subject of speech in one "region of space". Cf.: "I don't understand what happened to me and how he could have forced me to do this... But-I fired, and I hit this picture. (The Count pointed his finger at the shot-through painting...)"(A. S. Pushkin).

The pronoun such focuses on features (properties): such - "having the specified properties". Cf.: "Mother bowed her head over the book... The book has a brick cover. My father has a cabinet full of such books in his study, all of them are called Vestnik Evropy" (A. N. Tolstoy).

The pronoun thoth indicates that the speaker is "indifferent" as it were, on what basis the identification of the object of speech and the original set will take place: neither the assignment to one "region of space", nor the equality of properties are necessary for comparison here. It is assumed that there is only one set with which the subject of speech can be identified, and that the listener is able to do this: "Yegorushka rubbed his eyes. In the middle of the room stood Her Ladyship in the form of a young, very beautiful and plump woman in a black kerchief and straw hat. Before Yegorushka had time to make out her features, for some reason he remembered the lonely, slender poplar tree that he had seen on the hill during the day" (A. P. Chekhov).

The main meaning of the pronoun this is usually interpreted in dictionaries as follows: "Indicates an object located near someone, something, the closest in spatial terms in comparison with another, more distant; contra. the one (in 1 digit)" (Dictionary of the Russian language. In 4 volumes, Vol. IV. Moscow, 1988).

The meaning of the pronoun that, on the contrary, is characterized as an indication of a distant object. This difference in values is apparently,

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it can be explained by the fact that the pronoun this establishes the identity of the subject of speech with the original set on the basis of belonging to one region of space; this is an external, possibly non-permanent characteristic of the subject. It is possible to verify the authenticity of such an identification if there is a possibility of sensory perception of the object, that is, if it is located in close proximity to the speaker and listener. The pronoun that does not require confirmation of the existence of the subject of speech, so the listener is free to find his own place in the world. Note that the meanings "more remote", "second", "not the subject of action" appear in the pronoun that only when opposed. Let us add that the validity of the existence of the subject of speech denoted by the pronoun such is based on knowledge of the properties of things, so this pronoun does not imply spatial localization of the subject of speech at all. The "far - near" attribute is not essential for the meaning of such a pronoun.

Having described in general terms the features of the pronominal meaning, we will focus on the question of the position of pronouns in the system of parts of speech of the Russian language.

As early as 1940, A. I. Zaretsky noted that " pronouns do not differ from pronouns in the same way that nouns differ from adjectives. (...) If we call a noun (adjective, etc.) a part of speech, then the pronoun should be called something else, for example, a semantic category (...) Parts of speech differ in what they mean (as well as in syntactic and morphological features), and semantic categories-in how they mean (naming or pointing)" (Zaretsky A. I. Decree. op.).

Among the significant parts of speech, there are three semantic categories of words: nominal, verbal, and pronominal words. The basis for their differentiation may be differences in the way the facts of reality are indicated. Let us recall the words of A. F. Losev in this connection: "The laws and methods of functioning of linguistic signs in general have their own nature, i.e. the nature is not a direct reflection of reality or thinking about it, but their own understanding of reality itself and thinking about it, their own interpretation" (Losev A. F. Specificity of the language sign in connection with the understanding of language as the immediate reality of thought / / Izvestiya AN SSSR. Ser. lit. and yaz. 1976. Vol. 35. N 5).

K. S. Aksakov said well about the difference between a name and a verb: "The world as an image, as an object, is expressed in a word by a special form and a special category of words, or a part of speech: a name. ...The world as a force, as an action... Verb" (Aksakov K. S. Opyt russkoi grammatiki [Experience of Russian Grammar], Part I. Issue 1, Moscow, 1860]. P. V. Chesnokov contrasted the name and verb on the basis of times-

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in the way of reflecting the facts of reality: "Names reflect the facts of reality in their presence (being, existence), verbs reflect the facts of reality in their manifestation" (Chesnokov P. V. Grammar of the Russian language in the light of the theory of semantic forms of thinking. Taganrog, 1992). The pronoun has features both similar to the name and verb, and differences from them.

Like the name, the pronoun interprets the facts of the surrounding world as a given, as something static, captured at rest, while the verb implies a process, movement, development. The pronoun combines with the verb the possibility of interpreting the facts of reality through the relation to the speaker, to a specific speech situation, a kind of relativity. The name stands for facts, regardless of the speaker. Finally, the pronoun differs from the name and verb in that it cannot name things, but can only point to them (but this has already been said enough). Note that the wording of the features that distinguish one category from another still needs to be clarified.

Within each of these categories of words, you can distinguish particular lexical and grammatical categories: among verb words-infinitive, conjugated verb (verb in the forms of moods), participle and gerund, among names - noun, adjective, numeral, and adverb; among pronouns-pronominal noun, adjective, numeral and adverb. It is interesting that many lexical and grammatical categories belonging to different categories have a clear grammatical parallelism (cf. participle-adjective - pronominal adjective; adverb-adverb-pronominal adverb; infinitive-noun - pronominal noun).

Most often, in science and teaching practice, the lexical and grammatical categories of verb words are combined into one part of speech, while the nominal parts of speech are distinguished separately. The reason for this is the internal grammatical proximity of verb words (their connection with two verbal bases). Pronominal words, like verb words, can be considered as a single part of speech. The reason for this is the specificity of the general categorical pronominal meaning, a special view of the world contained in pronominal words, a special way of interpreting the facts of reality.

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