[N[N]] compounds in Russian: A growing family of constructions

Kapatsinski, Vsevolod; Vakareliyska, Cynthia

doi:10.1075/cf.5.1.03kap

Article published In: Constructions and Frames
Vol. 5:1 (2013) ► pp.69–87

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[N[N]] compounds in Russian

A growing family of constructions

Vsevolod Kapatsinski

Cynthia Vakareliyska

Published online: 5 August 2013

https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.5.1.03kap

Modern Russian contains a significant number of right-headed compounds modeled on Germanic [N[N]] compounds and containing recently borrowed English or German stems. The present article argues that these compounds are a family of partially lexically-specific constructions. Quantitative corpus data from the restricted semantic domain consisting of names of food/drink establishments support this claim by showing that the [N[N]] structure is specifically associated with certain head nouns. The article discusses the relationship between these and related constructions, and suggests motivations for the partial productivity of [N[N]] constructions in Russian.1

Keywords: compounding, syntactic borrowing, Construction Grammar, abstractness, Russian, collostructions

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