Constructions ‘Po + Body Part Noun’: The Crossroads of Grammar, Phraseology And Lexicology

Abstract

The article deals with constructions formed by Russian preposition po and body part nouns. On the one hand, they meet the interests of lexicology, phraseology and grammar and are being studied within these approaches, on the other hand, the data available is not very coherent. In order to provide a systemic description for this cluster of constructions, the ideas of Construction grammar have been applied. The article aims to reveal and scrutinize main families of po + body part nouns constructions. We extracted 26 constructions out of phraseological and auxiliary words dictionaries which were used as a source of material. Their analysis has shown that there are 6 families of the constructions in question: level constructions (po poyas ‘waist-high/deep’), high degree of a feature constructions (po ushi ‘over head and ears’), punishment constructions (po shee ‘in the neck’), matching constructions (po plechu ‘equal’), indifference constructions (poboku ‘awry’), temporal and locative constructions (po stopam ‘in the track of’, po bokam ot ‘on the sides of’). The families were studied with corpus data which allowed to enlarge the classes and assign some structure-semantic types within. The constructions correspond to different parts of speech and may be regarded as results of lexicalization, grammaticalization and pragmaticalization; however, they could be also considered as constructionalization effects.