Synkretizm i polifunkcionaľnosť v jazyke

The aim of the paper is to define the term of syncretism, to compare it with other terms such as polyfunctionality, polysemy, contamination etc., to outline the main notions of syncretism in special literature and to give some examples of syncretic phenomena in Russian. In linguistics syncretism is usually understood as the identity of form of distinct forms of a word as a result of merging of two or more originally different inflectional forms or rarely as the synthesis of differential structural or semantic features of language units. A short historical outline of research on syncretism is given as well. Syncretism is then analyzed within a broader theory of transitivity/transition worked out by V. V. Babaytseva.