Ad hoc categorization in Russian and multifunctional general extenders

Russian, as well as many other languages, displays a wide number of strategies to name non-lexicalized categories, that is, categories which have a conceptual reality, but are not encoded as single lexical items (e.g. fruit, furniture) or set phrases (e.g. equipment for sport, food for dog). One way to address this lack of lexical means is to provide one or more concrete exemplars of the intended category, in an attempt to capture the superordinate non-lexicalized concept. This paper aims to provide an overview of the different generalizing means used in Russian for the online construction of exemplar-driven categories, and, at the same time, to explore the interplay between discourse resources (e.g. exemplification, listing and reformulation) and system-resources (e.g. collective affixation, co-compounding and discourse markers) in the process of categorization. Particular attention will be focused on the description of schematic general extenders, that is, partially lexicalized syntactic patterns, realizing the different extending, generalizing and similative functions of general extenders. The last part of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of the general extender i vse takoe ‘and so on’ (lit. ‘and all such’). The form is interesting because of its discursive multifunctionality