Grammaticalization of the Russian prepositional unit po puti ‘along the way’

Chen Xueqing

The Russian grammatical system of the Russian language is constantly developing and replenishing through the grammaticalization of prepositional units. Grammaticalized polyfunctional prepositional constructions, consisting of non-derivative prepositions and significant words, can function as adverbs, predicatives, derivative prepositions, conjunctions, etc. The article is devoted to the problem of grammaticalization the prepositional units po puti ‘along the way’. The article classifies the polyfunctional unit po puti ‘along the way’ according to its morphological relation, reveals the process of transformation of the lexem "path" and finds out the change in the syntactic possibilities of the unit.

Keywords: grammaticalization, polyfunctionality, prepositional unit, preposition, ‘along the way’.