Russian interrogative pronouns as a lexicographic type

Abstract

Our study tackles Russian interrogative-relative pronouns ( wh -words) as a lexicographic type which requires a unified treatment. Our objective is to give a systematic description and explanation of the numerous collocational and constructional properties of the Russian wh -words using lexicographic and corpus methods. The dataset and statistics were extracted from the Russian National Corpus, at least 100 examples for each of the pronouns were analysed. Methodologically the study is based on the principles of the Moscow School of Semantics (namely, integral description of language and systematic lexicography) which are to a large extent rooted in the “Meaning⇔Text” theory. They include analysis of linguistic items on all levels of language; a focus on their semantic and combinatorial properties; acknowledged validity of dictionary as an instrument of linguistic research. The paper considers semantic, syntactic and co-occurrence properties shared by many Russian interrogative pronouns and analyzes the reasons for their almost entire lack in the pronouns zachem ‘what for’ and pochemu ‘why’. As demonstrated in the study, most of the constructional and co-occurrence properties typical of Russian interrogative pronouns (for example, co-occurrence with particles imenno ‘exactly’ and khot’ ‘at least’, constructions with mnogo ‘many’, malo ‘few’, etc.) are motivated by the semantics of multiplicity and choice, which are incompatible with ‘what for’ and ‘why’. In addition, as the findings show, different interrogative pronouns have different frequencies of occurrence in the described constructions, which is explained not by their general corpus frequencies or by the animacy hierarchy, but by the compatibility of their semantics with the meanings of multiplicity and choice. The obtained results suggest that combinatorial properties of wh -words are motivated by their semantics which, in turn, reflects the meta-linguistic characteristics of the situations to which they refer.