Nº 5 (2024)

The paper deals with the evolution of the Russian temporal conjunction kak after the 19^th century. Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, the paper investigates the semantic and formal restrictions that determine the use of kak in modern Russian but that were absent from the Russian language of the 19^th century. The changes that have occurred are interpreted from both semantic and grammatical points of view. Semantically, they can be attributed to the fact that after the 19^th century kak lost the ability to introduce a time reference for the main situation. Grammatically, I argue that the changes are due to a shift in the degree of syntactic integration of the clause introduced by kak: from tight integration to a weaker one. The latter interpretation challenges the widespread idea that temporal clauses tend to be tightly integrated cross-linguistically.

This article provides an overview of grammatical phenomena that are related to information structure in Northern Mansi, such as passive voice, object agreement, variation of participant coding in ditransitive constructions, non-possessive uses of the 3sg possessive marker, zero-reference, and discourse particles. I provide both a survey of previous research on the topic as well as present my suggestions on expanding the information-structural approach to these phenomena by considering other discourse-relevant parameters, such as the referential status and animacy of the participants, text genre, and narrative strategies.

In Hill Mari speech, there are both native conjunctions (for example, gə̈n’(ə̈) ‘if’, gə̈n’ät ‘although’) and borrowed Russian conjunctions (for example, esli ‘if’, xotja ‘although’). I examined the structure of conditional and concessive clauses in Hill Mari and compared them with the Russian ones. Structurally, these constructions are similar in Russian and Hill Mari (finite verbs, presence of a conjunction), only the position of the conjunction differs. Based on corpus data, I showed that in the Hill Mari speech, the conjunction esli ‘if’ is used prepositively, as in Russian, and can also be duplicated by the conjunction gə̈n’ (esli… gə̈n’). The conjunction xotja ‘although’ was not duplicated in my data; it also tends to be used prepositively. I have demonstrated that the choice between the Russian and Hill Mari conjunction depends on the speaker (no correlations with sociolinguistic parameters were found). A tendency towards more frequent use of Russian conjunctions was also noted in comparison to earlier data of other researchers. I assume that the use of Russian conjunctions can be explained by structural congruence between the strategies of conditional clause formation in the recipient language (Hill Mari) and in the donor language (Russian). At the same time, the congruence should be incomplete — duplication of conjunctions is possible, since there is an unoccupied slot at the beginning of the protasis for the Russian conjunction.

In this article, we discuss the approach to description of constructions adopted in William Croft’s monograph “Morphosyntax. Constructions of the World’s languages” (2022) and compare it to the approach to description and classification that is used in the Russian Constructicon. We conclude that Croft’s system and the Russian Constructicon show several substantial differences. First, Croft’s approach is based on the notion of Comparative Concepts and on an a priori classification of grammatical domains. By contrast, in the Russian Constructicon, a bottom-up approach is taken: it presupposes collecting the most representative inventory of constructions and, then, creating a system for classifying them. Second, the Russian Constructicon represents properties of constructions as a system of tags, where a construction can bear multiple tags, while Croft does not discuss cases of multiple tagging or grammatical class intersection. Finally, Croft’s system focuses on the core of grammar and includes mainly those values that are grammaticalized, while in the Russian Constructicon, attention is given not only to grammatical constructions, but also to constructions that can be termed ‘quasi-grammatical’ or ‘lexicalized’ — they have narrow semantics and combinational properties (here belong, for instance, iterative / frequentative constructions, such as to i delo ‘frequently’, and constructions with the terminative / resultative meaning, such as svoё otguljal ‘[he] is done with having fun’).