On the Semantic Evolution of Kuda ni Kin’

The paper concerns the semantic evolution of the Russian expression kuda ni kin’ on the material of the Russian National Corpus. On the synchronous level, this expression has two distinct meanings: visual (1) ‘wherever you look’ and mental (2) ‘whatever you think about’. Corpus data show that more abstract semantics (2) came into use first. This might suggest that, contrary to the widely accepted theories of metaphor, the active usage of the more abstract meaning (2) preceded a more concrete meaning (1). After studying the development of lexically closely related expressions kak ni kin’, kuda ni kin’ glazom/vzgl’ad and the proverb kuda ni kin’, vs’udu klin with the data acquired from Russian corpora, we come to the conclusion that kuda ni kin’ must have inherited its abstract meaning from the proverb, and later on it must have undergone a contamination process with the expression kuda ni kin’ (glazom/vzgl’ad), thus causing both the unexpected homonymy between the expressions and the uncharacteristically late upsurge of contexts with the meaning (1). Initially, kuda ni kin’ began to be used as an independent expression as a result of the omission of the second part of the proverb and inherited mental semantics from it. A new stage of its development was associated with the emergence of an elliptical variant of the construction kuda ni kin’ (glazom/vzgl’ad), which, in turn, was characterized by visual semantics. Thus, the order in which the meanings of kuda ni kin’ were formed reflects not the semantic development from abstract to concrete, but the formal coincidence of different constructions in one expression.