Russian Free Phrasal Indefinite Pronouns

• Authors: Igor Mel'čuk

Abstracts

EN

The paper describes Russian phrasal indefinite pronouns: both 1) phraseologized (= collocational), such as koe-kto ≈ ‘someone’, Bog znaet kto ‘God knows who’, kto ugodno ‘whoever’ or kto by to ni bylo ‘no matter who’, and 2) free, such as {Ja vstretil} nikto iz tvoix druzej ne dogadaetsja kogo ‘{I met} none of your friends will guess whom’ (a.k.a. syntactic amalgams). Three lexical entries are presented: for the indefinite pronominal lexeme kto1 ≈ ‘-body; -one’, for the premodifying indefiniteness type marker idiom ˹Bog znaet˺ ‘God knows’, and for the postmodifying indefiniteness type marker particle -to4 ≈ ‘some’. Formal representations of collocational and free phrasal indefinite pronouns at three levels of linguistic representation (semantic, deep-syntactic and surface-syntactic) are given, as well as rules for constructing both types of pronouns.

Keywords

EN

Russian language; lexicology; indefinite pronouns; collocational and free phrasal pronouns; syntactic amalgams

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
• Journal: Neophilologica
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 35
• Pages: 1-28

Dates

published

2023

Contributors

author

Igor Mel'čuk

• Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte, Université de Montréal, Canada

• https://orcid.org/0000000245200554

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Identifiers

DOI

10.31261/NEO.2023.35.13

Biblioteka Nauki

31341263