Constructionalization of body part constructions in Russian: five constructions with face, eyes, forehead, and back terms

The paper examines the evolution of five Russian constructions that include body part terms: в лицо ‘in face’, в глаза ‘in eyes’, в лоб ‘in forehead’, за спиной ‘behind back’, and за глаза ‘behind eyes’. The qualitative analysis is based on the materials of the Russian National Corpus (main, National Media, Old East Slavic, and Middle Russian subcorpora). The five constructions constitute a family of “inclusative and exclusative” constructions. A crucial feature of the family is its semantics of the purposeful inclusion or exclusion of a participant, specifically the topic of the conversation. Inclusative constructions refer to situations in which a person is insulted or mocked openly and in their presence, ‘to their face’. Exclusative constructions denote situations in which an absent person is discussed, ridiculed, or negatively affected in some other way secretly, ‘behind their back’. Non-compositional structure of the aforementioned constructions provides them with the ability to obtain non-trivial semantics. The paper discusses these meanings (such as presence or absence), explores the emergence of the five constructions in Russian, and describes the dynamic interactions and variations in the diachronic development within the family. The research shows that the three oldest constructions of the family have followed a similar historical trajectory: в лицо ‘in face’, в глаза ‘in eyes’ and за глаза ‘behind eyes’ had the ability to denote a more general ‘presence’ or ‘absence’ meaning, but have now developed to only describe open or secret communication. Moreover, the three constructions had multiple formal variants (in terms of lexemes and case forms), but only one variant in each case has survived the competition. Moreover, the research shows that the process of constructionalization is still ongoing: some of the discussed constructions are developing new semantics pertaining to online vs offline communication.