The Role of Prepositions in Semantization of Syntactic Relations: (Historical Aspect)
The author argues that strengthening of prepositions in the history of the Russian language should not be considered as the display of the analytic trend, but as the semantic independence of the substantive forms, because it does not enlarge their grammatical isolation, but makes them free “syntaxems” (G.A. Zolotova’s term), with semantics not depending on syntax. That is why it is reasonable to consider the expansion of the Russian prepositions as the tendency towards semantization of syntactic relations.