Shortening mechanisms in construction morphology: the Russian spec-N construction

Abstract This study presents an in-depth analysis of Russian stub compounds in spec ‘special’ and their competition with the corresponding full adjective special’nyj ‘special’ followed by a noun. Couched in Construction Morphology the corpus-based analysis addresses four understudied areas in theoretical and Russian morphology: shortening mechanisms, competition between morphological words and multiword expressions, blocking, and compounding in Russian. It is argued that shortening mechanisms create words that are more than stylistic variants of the corresponding longer constructions, although full synonymy may occur under specific conditions. The diachronic and synchronic motivation of the shortening mechanism under scrutiny is analyzed in terms of economy, extravagance and expressiveness. Blocking is demonstrated to be statistical (involving tendencies rather than categorical rules) and bidirectional, whereby a morphological construction may be favored over a syntactic construction and vice versa. The proposed analysis adds to the knowledge of stub compounds in Russian and demonstrates how a wide variety of generalizations can be adequately accounted for in Construction Morphology.