Typology and lexicography: the russian verb brosit’ and its serbian translational equivalent baciti on a typological background

The paper presents the research conducted for the project “Comparative lexicology of the Serbian and Russian languages”, one of the key tasks of which is the development of a theoretical and methodological basis for a new Serbian-Russian dictionary. Using the example of two translational equivalents – Russian brosit’ and Serbian baciti – the paper examines the role of an accessible lexical typological background in a comparative analysis of semantics and distribution of words from closely related languages. We show that basic knowledge about the principles of lexicalization of the semantic field of throwing in the languages of the world makes it possible to identify subtle differences in the use of translational equivalents, such as a stronger deviation from the prototypical throwing for Russian brosit’ in comparison to Serbian baciti and differences between Russian and Serbian constructions with the meaning of throwing to a target. We believe that systematic account of typological patterns would be useful for compiling lexicographic descriptions of other semantic domains as well.