Studi Slavistici XXIII (2026) 1
Articoli

Nizy, koški, peregovory and vybory: Lexicalization Profiles

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  • Elena Spaziani
Elena Spaziani
Sapienza University of Rome
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Studi_Slavis-18116

Published 2026-07-02

Keywords

  • pluralia tantum,
  • Russian,
  • Lexicalization,
  • Corpus-Driven Analysis,
  • Behavioral Profiles

Copyright (c) 2026 Elena Spaziani

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The paper provides a systematic diachronic analysis of the lexicalization in the plurals of four nouns: niz ‘bottom’; koška‘cat’; peregovor ‘discussion’ and vybor ‘choice’. The corpus-driven study was conducted adopting the procedure of behavioral profiles, which consisted of three phases: retrieving 401 concordance lines from the Russian National Corpus; annotating 84 senses according to a set of 57 linguistic features; visualizing and analyzing the co-occurrence information through a dimensionality reduction technique (MDS) in a two-dimensional space, where the distance between data points is indicative of their semantic similarity. During the annotation a distributional principle was established to distinguish the grammatical plural from the lexicalized plural. The semantic derivation underlying lexicalization was annotated as metonymic for most plurals. Considering both the distance between the original sense and the lexicalized sense and the sense level frequency, a defective paradigm seems to expand: paradigmatically, as in peregovory ‘negotiations’, or semantically, as in vybory ‘elections’, nizy ‘lower classes’, and koški ‘crampons’.

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