How to threaten in Russian: a constructionist approach

Abstract

The article analyzes various linguistic means to carry out threats in Russian with special focus on 27 constructions tagged as “Threat” in the Russian Constructicon, a linguistic repository of more than 2200 constructions in the Russian language. The major purpose of the current study is to investigate what constitutes a threat in Russian and how threats are related to other constructions. Unlike talking about threats, performing them in Russian does not involve the verbs ugrožatʹ and grozitʹ ‘threaten’. Instead, speakers prefer to use various indirect strategies, such as the construction Pogovori mne eščë!‘Don’t you dare talk like that!’. Although the constructions involve considerable variation in form and content, they share a common structure. The proposed taxonomy suggests that threats comprise three components that can be referred to as “Cause” (the undesired action of the THREATENEE), “Condition” (the action that the THREATENEE should take to avoid the Content of the threat), and “Content” (the harmful action that the THREATENER promises to carry out). In most cases one or two components are left out and the remaining components are often referred to through metonymy. The article furthermore contributes to Construction Grammar: it is proposed that lateral relationships between constructions can be of two types, referred to as “Overlap” (sharing a common semantic schema) and “Disambiguation in context” (sharing a common constructional schema).