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.