Prohibitive constructions in Russian: Families and clusters

Abstract

In this study we explore the relationships of constructions in families and clusters. We examine fifty-seven multi-word Russian grammatical constructions that encode prohibitive semantics and model them as a radial category network that consists of two distinct clusters formed by eleven families of constructions. We show that each cluster of families is centered around a local prototype.

The data is collected from the Russian Constructicon (Janda et al. 2020), an open-access electronic database of over 2200 Russian constructions accompanied with descriptions of their properties and corpus-based examples (https://constructicon.github.io/russian/). We focus on “partially schematic” constructions (Ehrlemark et al. 2016) that lie between the two extremes of fully idiomatic expressions and fully compositional syntactic sequences. Partially schematic constructions have both open slots and constraints on the fillers, as in the construction nečego Cop VP-Ipfv.Inf! (as in Nečego balovat’ detej! ‘It’s no good to spoil children!’), where nečego ‘lit. nothing-Gen’ is the fixed part, whereas VP-Inf is a slot that can be filled with certain types of verbal predicates.

In order to identify families of prohibitive constructions, we employ a combination of semantic and syntactic tags elaborated in the Russian Constructicon. We define a family of constructions as a relatively small and arguably homogeneous group of about two to nine constructions that exhibit family resemblance and share some semantic, syntactic (function in a clause and structure of the fixed part), and structural properties (e.g. reduplication, negation, inversion, etc.). Having family resemblance means that the constructions in a family share not necessarily all properties but various subsets of these properties.

Constructions in Cluster 1 prohibit a future action. We find that the core prohibitive semantics is expressed by three families of constructions that contain negated imperatives (1), predicative phrases (2) and purpose clauses (3). Two peripheral families contain constructions that combine the semantics of prohibition and intensity and constructions that express attenuated prohibition. Even more peripheral is a family transitional from Prohibition to Warning. Constructions in Cluster 2 lack the marker of negation and express prohibition of an on-going activity, as in (4) (termed continuative prohibition in Rakhilina 2013).

(1) ne smet’-Imp VP-Ipfv.Inf ‘Don’t you dare X’ (2) NP-Dat Cop nel’zja VP-Inf ‘For someone it is not allowed to do X’ (3) čtoby (nikakoj-Gen) NP-Gen PP/Adv (ne bylo)! ‘No X-es! [lit. in order to (none) X (not was)]!’ (4) budet PronPers-Dat (VP-Ipfv.Inf)! ‘Stop [lit. will] X-ing for a while!’

References

Rakhilina, Ekaterina. 2013. Konduktor, nažmi na tormoza... [Conductor, press the brakes...]. In Computational linguistics and Intellectual Technologies 12(19), Papers from the Annual International Conference “Dialogue-2013”, 665–673. Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities. Ehrlemark, Anna, Richard Johansson & Benjamin Lyngfelt. 2016. Retrieving Occurrences of Grammatical Constructions. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, 815–824. Osaka, Japan. Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Valentina Zhukova, Daria Mordashova & Ekaterina Rakhilina. 2020. How to build a constructicon in five years: The Russian example. In Frank Brisard, Timothy Colleman, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans, and María Sol Sansiñena (eds.), The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research [a thematic issue of Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34], 162-175.