Entrenched Lexical Patterns: The Russian Construction N

The primary theoretical goal of the present study is to verify a hypothesis that fixedness of word combinations is not necessarily connected with non-compositionality. Many constructions formed in accordance with the rules governing the co-occurrence of their elements can nevertheless be retained in memory as separate units. Using large text corpora for the empirical data we are going to analyze the type of construction N (that's /just the whole N) which is realized in a wide variety of tokens and demonstrate that some tokens of the construction can be so frequent that they can be considered to be cognitively entrenched units and are preserved in memory as separate units of the language. Such units should be described as separate items of the lexicon. The practical task of the investigation is to refine our notions about the structural peculiarities of N (that's /just/ the whole N) and its variant N (that's /just/ the whole N).a We are also going to identify some regularities of distribution of fillers of the slot N in both variants of the construction and formulate corresponding rules for such distribution.