The paper proposes a functional approach to Russian metalinguistic comparatives examined in a cross-linguistic perspective. Specifically, on the basis of the Russian National Corpus, it argues for that Russian exhibits three such comparatives derived as a result of lexicalization of the following items: lucse ‘better’, skoree ‘sooner’, and bol’se ‘more’. The paper demonstrates that semantically, the comparatives denote Preferentiality, Probablity, and Prototypicality respectively. Morphosyntactically, it shows that they are quite distinct from standard comparatives and also from each other.