Fixed prepositional-nominal constructions as a lexicophraseological continuum

The subject matter of the paper is related to a topic relevant in historical and modern lexicology and lexicography of the Russian language, i. e., the controversial status of fixed prepositional-nominal constructions exhibiting the features of both words and phraseological units. The article examines the history of the fixed two-component combinations v devkakh (English not married (about a girl), v durakakh (English duped), v gostyakh (English at somebody else’s place), v lyudyakh (English for hire). The constructions are built on the same grammatical pattern "v + N₆ (anim, pl)" which refers the subject to a certain social, evaluative or role category. The material was extracted from various corpus and lexicographic sources. The analysis utilised descriptive and contextual methods, as well as phraseological modeling. We studied the status transformations of structurally identical prepositional-nominal constructions. The combinations v devkakh, v durakakh (an additional specific meaning associated with playing cards was formed in the history of this combination), as well as the historically polysemous construction v lyudyakh meaning ‘po naymu’/ English for hire (collocating with the verbs byt’ / English to be, zhit’ / English to live, rabotat’ / English to work) underwent phraseo logisation in the process of functioning. The analysis resulted in determining the factors contributing to the phraseo logisation of prepositional-nominal combinations formed according to the pattern "v + N₆ (anim, pl)". These are a significant semantic shift, expressiveness, predominant use in the predicative syntactic function, often with accompanying verbs or directly as part of verbal phraseological units, and possibly word-formation variability of the noun component. Combinations without metaphoric transfer used in the adverbial (in particular, locative) function were predisposed to lexicalisation. Moreover, it could be significant that there were combinations with the same noun and other prepositions in the language. The unit v gostyakh was adverbialised. However, the combination v lyudyakh with the semantics in society did not complete this process: it remained in an intermediate state and became obsolete. In modern Russian, the combinations na lyudyakh, prilyudno (English in public) have acquired this meaning. The research focuses on the functioning of single-structure fixed prepositional-nominal constructions in a broad diachronic perspective (from the first recording to their use in modern Russian). The analysis leads to the conclusion that it is necessary to interpret the changes in their history as a complex multi-stage process where different phases are reflected in the linguistic state of various periods.

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