K evoljucii taksonomičeskich terminov: russkoje tipa i ego funkcional'nye raznovidnosti

The word tipa is the result of grammaticalization of taxonomic noun tip-a. The expansion of russian tipa in everyday discourse is followed by the de-construction of bi/three-nominal genitive constructions and the neutralization of morpho-syntactic features of the substantive. This process has been registered in the past decade of the twentieth century. The process of evolution of taxonomic nouns in pragmatic markers has been attested and widely studied in different languages as well. This article suggests some diachronic considerations with the intent to show the necessity of further and deeper analysis in order to compare the dates cross-linguistically; the investigation focuses also on the functional extension of word tipa, in particular in the spoken informal language. The research is based on the collection of the Russian National Corpus. The various functions of tipa have been integrated in three main macro functional-semantic units: 1. approximation; 2. quotation; 3. specification. It is possible to observe functional parallelism of the spoken tipa and the quotation marks in written language.