Edited by Ekaterina Rakhilina, Tatiana Reznikova and Daria Ryzhova
What is it like? – This is often the first question we ask about any object, and it is typically answered with adjectives: old, smooth, pointed, narrow, etc. Characteristics of things around us is a fundamental aspect of how we conceptualize the physical world, regardless of when or where we live –… read more
We investigated diachrony of distributional semantics of two competing Russian colour terms (CTs) for ‘brown’, buryj (11th century) and koričnevyj (17th century), using the Russian subcorpus of Google Books Ngram (2020). Time-series analysis (1800–2019) of bigrams gauged each term’s frequencies… read more
This paper introduces discourse formulae, i.e. frequently used formulaic replies like No way! or You bet!, as an object for linguistic typology. It demonstrates that the frame methodology (Rakhilina & Reznikova 2016) could be applied to these multi-word pragmatic units. The method implies… read more
The semantic classification of over 2,200 constructions in the Russian Constructicon has emerged objectively from empirical analysis. The resulting semantic classification comports with and goes beyond frame semantics, revealing complex patterns of related constructions verified against corpus… read more
The chapter outlines the goals of our project, points out the aspects that distinguish the vocabulary of qualities from other lexical domains, when viewed from a typological perspective, and introduces the methods of data collection and analysis we use in this project and in other related… read more
This chapter gives a description of the old terms typology across 78 world languages. The sample size in the research is relatively big, as compared to the other studies in this volume, which is attributable to two main reasons: the semantics of old terms has already been thoroughly described… read more
We provide a practical step-by-step methodology of how to build a full-scale constructicon resource for a natural language, sharing our experience from the nearly completed project of the Russian Constructicon, an open-access searchable database of over 2,200 Russian constructions (https://site. read more
The paper examines the properties of heavy as a perceptual concept, based on evidence from 11 languages. We demonstrate that the semantics of this concept is heterogeneous; lexemes of this field can be used in situations of at least three types: Lifting, Shifting and Weighing. These situations… read more
The Russian Constructicon project currently prioritizes multi-word constructions that are not represented in dictionaries and that are especially useful for learners of Russian. The immediate goal is to identify constructions and determine the semantic constraints on their slots. The Russian… read more
The paper presents a research tool for studying semantic change and polysemy patterns in Russian adjectives and adverbs. It is based on a corpus analysis of high-freqency polysemous units. For each of them we describe the meanings it can have, assign to each meaning a corresponding taxonomic class,… read more
Russian attributive constructions with colour terms are analyzed using the Russian National Corpus. We focus on recently emerging colour terms and their development through to the early twenty-first century. Terms are considered in a construction-based framework, as syntactic-semantic rule pairs,… read more
The paper contrasts the verbs plyt’/plavat’ in Russian and plynac/plywac in Polish with their correspondences in Dutch, English and Swedish against a broader typological background. The three Germanic languages use several verbs for what is covered by a pair of derivationally related verbs in each… read more
The aim of this article is to provide an account of possible parameters of semantic variation within the domain of rotation in Russian and Polish. The paper presents a corpus-based analysis (supplemented by questionnaires) of five Russian and five Polish verbs, both cognates and not. The results of… read more
The paper provides a specific approach to the semantics of color, which differs from the most widespread “psycholinguistic” account – in that it privileges linguistic behavior of color terms. The main object of this investigation is linguistic combinability of color-term adjectives with regards to… read more
