Sidit kak etot samyi...: about three rounds of idiomatization of the pronoun samyi in Russian everyday speech

The functioning of the word samyj is considered in the article using the fan scaling technique, which allows one to see the action of such active processes of oral speech as grammaticalization, resemantization, idiomatization, and pragmaticalization. The study focuses on three rounds of idiomatization, which this technique reveals. In the first round (IDIOM¹) of idiomatization, the form of the superlative undergoes idiomatization, itself having become the result of the process of grammaticalization: samoe plevoe delo, v samom chernom vide. In the second round (IDIOM²), the pronoun samyj in combination with nouns, adverbs, verbs, interjections, and even with idioms becomes a component of an adverbial or other stable expression: po samuyu sheyu, po samoe pokorno blagodaryu. Finally, the third round of idiomatization (IDIOM³) is observed after the combination eto samoe has undergone pragmaticalization and started to realize the functions of hesitation, self-correction, a starting boundary marker, and some others in oral discourse. In fact, here we deal with a set expression, typical only for spoken language and expressing in different contexts a different, often hard-to-define, meaning. Observations over corpus material show that the construction like eto samoe (in different grammatical forms) without the sought-after noun has a distinctly conversational character and is found both in oral speech and in its imitations in artistic texts. The findings might be useful both in theoretical (colloquialistics and cognitive science) and in practical (teaching RFL and translation practice) aspects.

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