Syntactic Idioms across Languages: Corpus Evidence from Russian and English

Russian linguistics. 2014. Vol. 38. No. 2. P. 187 –203.

Apresyan V.

This paper considers the issues of compositionality, concessive meaning, negative polarity, scalarity, linguistic anthropocentricity, and semantics-syntax interaction in a corpus study of the concessive syntactic idiom pri vsjom X-e ‘with all X’ in Russian and its non-idiomatic counterpart with all X in English. The study demonstrates (a) both compositional and non-compositional components in the Russian idiom on syntactic and semantic levels; (b) strong correlation between the semantic and syntactic properties of the idiom; (c) semantic properties typical of other syntactic idioms (such as negative polarization); (d) pragmatic properties that are typical of other syntactic idioms (such as entailments incorporating implicit scales and anthropocentric evaluation); (e) language-specific idiomatic status, which cannot be predicted compositionally and needs to be established on an individual basis, even when a seemingly identical item is present in the two languages under comparison.  

Keywords: semantics, семантика, композициональность, прагматика, pragmatics, синтаксис, syntax, syntactic phraseme, синтаксическая фразема, compositionality, анафора, anaphor, negative polarity, отрицательная поляризация

Publication based on the results of: Corpus technologies in linguistic and interdisciplinary research (2014)