The article deals with the question of expanding the boundaries of grammar in order to include into it discourse analysis, which, in turn, is impossible without expanding the semantic base of the described language units and their semantic transformations in diff erent types of discourses. Th e author states that the idea of developing “Russian Grammar of Meanings” was expressed by N. Yu. Shvedova immediately aft er the completion of the 1980 Russian Academic Grammar. Th e author provides information on modern approaches to this problem, associated with the representation of the general structure of the narrative (in its broad discursive sense), and the allocation of invariant structural components, characteristic for all possible narratives. Cases of proximity of values of separately taken syntactic constructions and their real belonging to diff erent types of discourses are demonstrated in order to confi rm the need of including into grammatical semantics not only the meanings of linguistic units, but also the general properties of their discursive functioning.