When The Moment Does Not Last: A Few Words On Moment-Constructions in Russian
When The Moment Does Not Last: A Few Words On Moment-Constructions in Russian

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to constructions with the noun ‘moment’ (MC) in modern Russian. Our corpusstudy shows that Russian moment is mainly used in certain constructions. We focus on its fourmain types; each of them determines the semantics of the noun moment. While the word originallydesignated an instant, a precise moment (moment vzryva ‘moment of explosion’), it also designatesa long temporal period with very vague boundaries (na dannyj moment ‘currently, at today’s time’)or loses its temporal meaning altogether in order to designate a particular aspect of the situation(ličnyj moment ‘personal moment’) which places it in the domain of argumentative vocabulary.Some of these constructions are characterized by a certain degree of fixity. The paper describes bothsyntactic and semantic features of each of the four models through the three centuries of evolutionof the MC in modern Russian.

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