Russian verboids: A case study in expressive vocabulary

International audienceLike other Balto-Slavic languages, Russian makes extensive use of verboids, a class of deverbal formations lacking inflectional and derivational markers. The use of verboids is characteristic of oral narration and is typically accompanied by gesture. This article surveys the properties of verboids based on data from the Russian National corpus. It shows that verboids bear a striking resemblance to ideophones and similar “expressive” words in other languages, presenting a typologically unusual case of verb-derived expressive words in a language with rich verbal morphology. It is argued that the peculiar behavior of Russian verboids should be analyzed with reference to their indexical, as opposed to purely symbolic, meaning: verboids differ from inflected verbs in not encoding general concepts, but rather pointing directly to particular instances of events. The indexical meaning helps account for a number of morphosyntactic properties that distinguish verboids from verbs, such as their incompatibility with negation and questions. Besides the restrictions shared with ideophones, Russian verboids are characterized by properties determined by the structure of Russian lexicon; in particular, they are shown to neutralize semantic distinctions encoded by Russian verbal morphology, as well as certain distinctions that can only be neutralized with some verbs in colloquial speech