Russian Free Phrasal Indefinite Pronouns
Russian Free Phrasal Indefinite Pronouns

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes Russian phrasal indefinite pronouns: both 1) phraseologized (= collocational),such as koe-kto ≈ ‘someone’, Bog znaet kto ‘God knows who’, kto ugodno ‘whoever’ or kto by toni bylo ‘no matter who’, and 2) free, such as {Ja vstretil} nikto iz tvoix druzej ne dogadaetsja kogo‘{I met} none of your friends will guess whom’ (a.k.a. syntactic amalgams). Three lexical entries arepresented: for the indefinite pronominal lexeme kto1 ≈ ‘-body; -one’, for the premodifying indefinitenesstype marker idiom ˹Bog znaet˺ ‘God knows’, and for the postmodifying indefinitenesstype marker particle -to4 ≈ ‘some’. Formal representations of collocational and free phrasal indefinitepronouns at three levels of linguistic representation (semantic, deep-syntactic and surfacesyntactic)are given, as well as rules for constructing both types of pronouns.

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