Le costruzioni con verbo supporto in russo: il caso di DELAT’

Russian Support Verb Constructions with DELAT’. This paper deals with Support Verb Constructions (SVC) in Russian that are formed by the verb delat’ ‘to make’ and its nominal object (V+Nobj). The study has been carried out on the Russian Web Corpus (gathered by Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds), which is available as a pre-loaded corpus within The Sketch Engine corpus query system (http://the.sketchengine.co.uk). About 150 types of SVC with a token frequency ≥10 resulted from the query. The types have been classified into lexical-semantic patterns, on the basis of Nsubj and Nobj semantic features and the Support verb lexical-semantic meaning. Subsequently, the patterns have been grouped into the well-known actional classes of accomplishments, achievements, semelfactives, activities and states (Vendler 1967, Comrie 1976). The overall classification shows that most SVCs go hand in hand with the features of telicity (as regards verbs) and of concreteness and referentiality (as regards Nobj), whereas less SVCs can be found into the activity and states verb classes. Moreover, the presence of a high number of SVCs in the corpus may be considered as a further evidence of the typological shift towards the analytic type that contemporary Russian is apparently undergoing (see e.g. the simplification of noun declension, the expansion of invariable words and the increasing number of bi-aspectual verbs).