The meaning and use of podportit’ on the basis of the Russian National Corpus

Searching and finding the meaning of new verbs: prefix variation of the Russian verb гуглить ‘to google’

“…The term "prefix variation" originates in Janda & Lyashevskaya (2011), and although their article is the most thorough description of the phenomenon to date, the phenomenon itself has not completely escaped the attention of other scholars. The current article is methodologically close to the articles by Viimaranta (2014 and2017), who has studied the different meanings of the prefixed perfective verbs испортить 'to spoil' and подпортить 'to spoil' and their entire argument structure, comprising the concrete subjects, direct and indirect objects, adverbs and instruments used with испортить and подпортить. Other methods used to study prefix variation have been introspection on individual examples, for example покрасить and выкрасить 'to paint' in Dobrušina (1997, 136-37) and Svecinskaja (1997, 155), who explain that покрасить is used in the sense 'to paint (for a while)' whereas выкрасить carries the notion of 'covering something completely in paint'.…”