The lecture will focus on a variety of phenomena in modern Russian that occupy an intermediate position between the grammar and the dictionary. Most of these phenomena are of a highly individual character and require especially fine tools for research (the way certain medical conditions in need of surgical treatment require microsurgical instruments and techniques.

In particular, these phenomena include 1) syntactic idioms (i.e. such phraseological units that have syntactic properties different from those of normal linguistic units) and 2) non-standard syntactic constructions.

Examples of the first type of phenomena are expressions like
(1) s”est’ sobaku na X (lit. to eat a dog on X) ≈ ‘to have much experience in X’
or
(2) ruki češutsja X-ovat’ ≈ ‘there is a strong desire to perform X’
If we compare them with expressions that are lexically close to (1) and (2) but do not form phraseological units (cf. Zajac ne možet s”est’ sobaku ‘A hare cannot eat a dog’ or Posle etogo krema u menja ruki češutsja ‘my hands itch after I apply this kind of cream’) we will easily see that in addition to idiomatic meaning the given idioms acquire special properties of government (the preposition na in (1) that introduces the scope of experience or the infinitive in (2) that refers to the object of strong desire).

Examples of the second type of phenomena are constructions like
(3) Z-u X-ovat’ (cf. Vam vyxodit’ ‘You are to get off’, Komu rabotat’ ≈ ‘Who is there to work?’,
where the sense of a certain modality is not expressed by specific words like nužno ‘need’ or sleduet ‘should’ but by the constriction itself, or
(4) constructions with repeated words like X-ovat ne X-oval (cf. čitat’ ne čital (no listal) ≈ ‘ one didn’t really read it but flipped through’, xrapet’ on ne xrapit (a kakie-to zvuki vo sne prozivodit) ≈ ‘he does not exactly snore but he makes some sounds when he sleeps’ where the idea of incomplete action is not expressed by concrete lexical units like ne sovsem ‘not exactly’ or ne vprjamuju ‘not directly’ but by the repetition of words.

Special attention will be given to the techniques of strict description of such linguistic phenomena in theoretical and applied tasks.