Russian prefixed verbs as constructional schemas

Abstract

This study tests the morphological gradience theory on Russian prefixed verbs. With the help of a specially designed experiment, in which participants were asked to evaluate the semantic transparency of a prefixed nonse verb given in minimal context, as well as to semanticise it by suggesting an existing Russian verb with the same prefix, we offer evidence that these verbs can be analysed as constructional schemas and that the degree of their morphological decomposition depends upon the different levels of activation of their sequential and lexical links. We prove that speakers of Russian are very sensitive to the etymological connection between verb prefixes and the prepositions they are related to. Thus, prefix-stem constructions with prefixes that correspond to prepositions are more likely to be morphologically decomposed, while prefix-stem constructions with prefixes that do not relate to prepositions tend to be regarded as single lexical units. Moreover, the general, highly abstract semantics of Russian prefix-stem constructions, especially of those that retain their ‘prepositional’ meaning, is undoubtedly accessible to language users, which is confirmed by the fact that the interpretability of these constructions is affected by priming.