Russian Compounds with Samo- as First Non-head Constituent
In Construction Grammar not only syntactic patterns, but also word-formation patterns are
seen as constructions. Booij (2009) states that “[…] compounding is a construction at the
morphological level with a systematic pairing of form and meaning.” The present study aims at
analyzing a particular type of constructions of the Russian language, namely compounds with samoas first non-head constituent, within the framework of Construction Grammar (Booij 2005, 2009,
2010).
Compounds which exhibit the combining form (i. e. affixoid or semi-word) samo- as first
non-head constituent are very common in Russian. According to the definition of the Ožegov online
dictionary, samo- must be considered as the first element of compound words, and bears different
meanings: 1) orientation of something towards oneself (e. g. samozaščita); 2) addressing oneself (e.
g. samouverennyj); 3) accomplishment of something without any external help (e. g. samolečenie);
4) realizing something automatically (e. g. samoventilacija); 5) autocracy (e. g. samovlastie); and 6)
‘the most’ (e. g. samovažnejšij).
According to the meaning of the combining form samo- in different contexts, we can expect
to find different compound types. In particular, we could reduce the definitions of samo- given
above to two main interpretations of this element: a pronominal interpretation, namely cases 1), 2),
and 5), and an adverbial interpretation, i. e. cases 3) and 4). Case 6) represents a completely
different issue, since samo- here is the first constituent of compound adjectives in the superlative
form, and is used in place of samyj. In the pronominal interpretation, samo- can be conceived as the
internal argument of the verb from which the head of the compound is derived; conversely, in the
adverbial interpretation this analysis is not possible, and samo- is rather interpreted as an adjunct,
bearing the meaning of “autonomously, by oneself”. Following this distinction, the two possible
interpretations of samo- correspond to different compound types.
This study intends to analyze these constructs of the Russian language, considering different
aspects: the status of complex lexemes with samo- as first constituent, their internal structure (i. e.
the combinability of samo- with different lexical items), the semantic interpretation of the relation
between the two constituents in such lexemes, and their possible classification. Various degrees of
lexicalization exhibited by these lexemes will also be considered.
References
Booij, G. (2005), The Grammar of Words. An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology, Oxford/New
York: Oxford University Press.
Booij, G. (2009), Compounding and Construction Morphology, in The Oxford Handbook of
Compounding, Lieber, R. and Štekauer, P. eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 201-216.
Booij, G. (2010), Construction Morphology, New York: Oxford University Press.
Ožegov online dictionary, <http://ozhegov-online.ru/>.
Russian National Corpus, <http://ruscorpora.ru/>.