Video Recordings

The talk will be devoted to syntactic and semantic properties of Russian comparatives with the attenuative prefix po- like pobol’se ‘somewhat more’ or poumnee ‘a bit cleverer’. It will be shown that such units have two major types of usage, the comparative one and the selective one. The former is close to the semantics of the standard comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs, while the latter is closer to the semantics of the superlative. Within the comparative type a special case is described: the correlative construction which contains two attenuatives. Its outstanding feature is cross-filling of valency slots of the comparatives. The discussion will be largely based on joint research by Igor Boguslavsky and the speaker.