The syntactic construction <Р v podmetki (ne) *goditsya N3> in modern Russian speech

Abstract

The paper analyzes on the corpus material the comparative-evaluative construction <Р v podmetki (ne) *goditsya N₃>, in which P is the object at the origin of comparison, and N₃ is the component to which the object is compared: my (Р) emu (N₃) v podmetki ne godimsya. The attention in the article is focused on the verb godit’sya, which retains its entire inflectional paradigm within the construction, up to the participle form (napast’ na ikhn’yuyu khimicheskuyu kolu, v podmetki ne godyashchuyusya kvasu). The verb component in the construction can be considered as a slot, which allows the use of other verbs with the particle nе and with similar semantics (ne sgodit’sya, ne stat’, ne idti, ne vystupat’, ne katit’). The analysis also revealed cases of verb omission without changing the general comparative-evaluative meaning characteristic of the construction in question: vse ostal’noe po khudozhestvennomu razmakhu v podmetki ne:) Contexts in which there is no negation with the verb have been found. It can be shifted from the verb to the first object (ne mnogie godyatsya v podmetki), or the absence of negation forms a rhetorical question, with a hypothetical answer to which the semantics of the inferiority of one object before the other is preserved. The analysis of such constructions is important not only for Russian studies (grammar of speech and grammar of constructions), but also in the practice of translation and teaching Russian as a foreign language.