러시아어 абы 구문의 인지언어학적 연구

Abstract

This study is an attempt to describe the semantic characteristics of the diachronic and synchronic characteristics of the Russian particle ABY. ABY construction used as a conjunction has a meaning of limited purpose, condition, or method. As the purpose, condition, and method are replaced by interrogative pronouns, the ABY constructions acquire new semantic functions rather than a conjunctive function in a complex sentence. ABY construction with an interrogative pronoun expresses a meaning of “unspecifiedness” of a specific argument role of the sentence. The interrogative pronoun represents an argument, not referred, nor specified. In other words, the argument specifies a semantic role with referential indeterminacy. The unspecificity of interrogative pronouns is combined with the limitation of ABY to have the semantic characteristic of the unspecifiedness of the ABY construction. The interrogative pronoun KAK is related to the performance of an action such as a purpose, condition, method, etc., KTO means an unspecified person, an event participant, and CHTO signifies an unspecified event participant, etc. Another syntactic characteristic of this construction is that it often shows negative polarity. The ABY constructions are simply used in negative or interrogative sentences more often than in affirmative ones, because the unspecifiedness of the arguments. And the data in the Russian National Corpus provide evidences that negative polarity is not the intrinsic meaning of the constructions but the semantic-syntactic tendency. Through this process, it was possible to know the diachronic origin of the construction and its synchronic uses, based on empirical data. It was an interesting study subject that can be seen as an example of grammaticalization that can be seen in the process of assimilation of West Slavic expressions into Russian rather than simply dialectal elements of Russian.