编号 3 (2023)

The article addresses Russian colloquial constructions with the complemtizer čto, such as Ty skaži, čto ja že ne znal ‘Say that you didn’t know it (lit. ‘that “I didn’t know that”’) or On načal izvinjat’sja, čto on ne xotel ‘He began to apologize that he didn’t mean that’. These constructions are mainly described in respect of person: namely, of indexical shift, meaning that person is marked as in direct, rather than indirect speech. However, it turns out that other features also make this construction special: the two of them we describe here are possibility of interrogative and imperative constructions in the embedded clause and extended use of embedded clauses with the semantic role of content with verbs like otkazyvat’sja ‘refuse’ or izvinjat’sja ‘apologize’, which normally do not take this type of complement clauses. All these features are parts of the same process: re-analysis of the complementizer as a sort of a citation marker. At the same time, the three features do not necessarily correlate with each other: some uses are characterized with only one or two colloquial features. The data also show that some properties of constructions under analysis make them similar to unmarked complementation: both types of constructions do not behave as canonical complex sentences, and the second part does not show all properties of embedded clauses. In this sense, both the colloquial constructions with čto and unmarked complement clauses allow to unite two clauses, the second part not being signifi cantly demoted in syntactic status.

The article discusses the problems of etymologization of words with an expressive (and often derogatory) meaning, using the example of Russian čepuxa ‘nonsense’. The previously existing versions of this word’s origin are analyzed, their vulnerable aspects are noticed. The author develops the unpopular version by A. B. Strakhov, who interpreted the word as a formation with the archaic prefix če- and the root pux-; initially, čepuxa meant, probably, a kind of substance from a multitude of small particles, perceived as insignificant, not valuable (the result of fluttering, gutting, pulling, grinding). Against the background of the etymologization of čepuxa, a group reconstruction of the word family čepux-//čepuš- (functioning mainly in vernacular speech, dialects, jargons) was carried out. It made it possible to explain the meanings in the word family (including those quite distant from the semantics of the etymon — ‘to rain fine’, ‘to fuss’, ‘to have sex’, ‘female buttocks’, etc.), to separate the elements of this word family from heterogeneous homonyms (e.g., words with the root sop-), to reveal the origin of some non-obvious words from the word family pux-//puš- (puška ‘nonsense’). The conclusions of the article demonstrate the need for a close and detailed analysis of the data of non-standard language varieties, to which modern etymology rarely resorts. In addition, the author points out the need to verify some etymological decisions made earlier “on the tip of a pen” with a lack of lexical data and in the absence of corpora that etymologists can now use. The vulnerability of uncritical replication of etymological versions (especially in popular science literature) is shown, in which the authors use unverified material, substitute bare assertion for hypothesizing, etc.