The article examines the system of parts of speech in modern Russian and argues for its refinement on the basis of a multi-criterion approach. The relevance of the study stems from the continuing controversy surrounding the issue: despite the stability of the classification used in schools and universities, the composition and boundaries of individual word classes remain disputed, and the number of parts of speech identified varies across descriptions. The aim of the research is to determine the criteria for classifying parts of speech in Russian, to identify the zones in which classes overlap, and to characterise the dynamic processes that alter the composition of word classes. The material comprises a corpus of scholarly and reference literature: classical works on Russian morphology, academic grammars, and contemporary studies in the theory of parts of speech and the typology of word classes. Descriptive, structural-semantic, distributional and contrastive-typological methods were applied, together with content analysis of scholarly sources. The findings show that parts of speech in Russian do not constitute a discrete partition of the lexicon: classes are linked by relations of prototypicality, and between them lie transitional zones filled by hybrid units. Four types of transitional phenomena are identified and described, and the status of the most disputed classes — predicatives, participles, gerunds, pronouns and modal words — is substantiated. The practical value of the study lies in the applicability of its conclusions to the teaching of Russian morphology, including in classrooms where Russian is not the students' first language.

parts of speech, morphology, modern Russian, classification, grammatical meaning, transitivity, transposition, predicatives, prototype, typology of word classes.

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