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Pri vsjom X-e: a Corpus Study of a Russian Syntactic Phraseme
The paper presents a corpus study of the concessive syntactic phraseme pri vsjom X-e ‘with all X’ in Russian. The study demonstrates (a) a strong correlation between the semantics of the phraseme and its other linguistic properties; (b) pragmatic properties that are typical of syntactic phrasemes in general; (c) language-specific phraseological status. In particular, the combination of concession and intensification in its meaning explains its status as a negative polarity item; the fact that it refers to properties of objects explains its co-referential requirements. Pragmatically, like many other syntactic phrasemes, pri vsjom X-e entails a certain structured worldview. Its linguistic properties are not carried across languages: its closest English counterpart, the construction with all X does not manifest any of its properties. This proves that the status of a syntactic phraseme and all its linguistic consequences in one language cannot be predicted on the basis of the data from another language, and thus ought to be established on an individual basis.