A network of allostructions: quantified subject constructions in Russian

Nesset, Tore; Janda, Laura A.

doi:10.1515/cog-2021-0117

Cited by 4 publications

References 52 publications

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How to threaten in Russian: a constructionist approach

Жукова

2023

Russ Linguist

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The article analyzes various linguistic means to carry out threats in Russian with special focus on 27 constructions tagged as “Threat” in the Russian Constructicon, a linguistic repository of more than 2200 constructions in the Russian language. The major purpose of the current study is to investigate what constitutes a threat in Russian and how threats are related to other constructions. Unlike talking about threats, performing them in Russian does not involve the verbs ugrožatʹ and grozitʹ ‘threaten’. Instead, speakers prefer to use various indirect strategies, such as the construction Pogovori mne eščë!‘Don’t you dare talk like that!’. Although the constructions involve considerable variation in form and content, they share a common structure. The proposed taxonomy suggests that threats comprise three components that can be referred to as “Cause” (the undesired action of the threatenee), “Condition” (the action that the threatenee should take to avoid the Content of the threat), and “Content” (the harmful action that the threatener promises to carry out). In most cases one or two components are left out and the remaining components are often referred to through metonymy. The article furthermore contributes to Construction Grammar: it is proposed that lateral relationships between constructions can be of two types, referred to as “Overlap” (sharing a common semantic schema) and “Disambiguation in context” (sharing a common constructional schema).

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How to threaten in Russian: a constructionist approach

Жукова

2023

Russ Linguist

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Understanding ‘many’ through the lens of Ukrainian багато

Janda,

Palii

2024

Russ Linguist

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We reveal an ongoing language change in Ukrainian involving a construction with a subject comprised of the indefinite quantifier багато ‘many’ modifying a noun phrase in the Genitive Plural. Number agreement on the verb varies, allowing both Singular (in 69.1% of attestations) and Plural (in 30.9% of attestations). Based on statistical analysis of corpus data, we investigate the influence of the factors of year of creation, word order of subject and verb, and animacy of the subject on the choice of verb number. We find that, while all combinations of word order and animacy are robustly attested, VS word order and inanimate subjects tend to prefer Singular, whereas SV word order and animate subjects tend to prefer Plural. Since about the 1950s, the proportion of Plural has been increasing, overtaking Singular in the current decade. We propose that this Singular vs. Plural variation is motivated by the human embodied experience of construing a group of items as either a homogeneous mass (and therefore Singular) or a multiplicity of individuals (and therefore Plural). This proposal is supported by the identification of micro-constructions that prefer Singular and show reduced individuation of human beings.

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Constructional Approaches to Language

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A network of allostructions: quantified subject constructions in Russian

Cited by 4 publications

References 52 publications

How to threaten in Russian: a constructionist approach

How to threaten in Russian: a constructionist approach

Understanding ‘many’ through the lens of Ukrainian багато

Constructional Approaches to Language

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