Constructions Built of Constructions: Intensified Comparatives

Zeitschrift fur Slawistik. 2026. Vol. 71. No. 2. P. 259–284.

Rakhilina E. V., Zhukova V., Akhapkina Y.

This study examines the most numerous type of construction presented in the Russian Constructicon, namely intensifiers. We studied intensifiers in the context of comparative constructions of inequality like Х bol’še Y‘X is bigger than Y’ –> Х gorazdo bol’še Y‘X is much bigger than Y’. Comparative constructions and intensifiers are usually studied separately since they belong to two distinct semantic fields. However, the interaction of two constructions – comparative and intensifying – is not trivial and has its own rules. Besides expected morphological and syntactic constraints, less trivial restrictions such as an aspectual class of the verb in the scope of the comparative construction are attested. We show the ways these two constructions merge into a new entity that is also a construction with its own properties, which cannot be reduced to those of the comparative and intensifying constructions taken individually.

Keywords: русский язык, Russian, Construction Grammar, грамматика конструкций, comparative constructions, редупликация, Constructicon, reduplication, слова-интенсификаторы, конструктикон, intensifiers,, сравнительные конструкции (компаративы)

Publication based on the results of: Linguistic and cognitive diversity in formal models, computer tools, and educational resources (2025)