A Corpus Exploration of Construction Frames for Russian ‘Resultant State’ Converb Constructions

This study formulates construction frames that characterise the grammatical and semantic features of the ‘resultant state’ usage of Russian converbs. By utilising the grammatical and semantic tag sets of the Russian National Corpus (RNC), two frames are developed as search queries aimed at eliciting the maximum number of examples of converbs with ‘resultant state’ usage: [VerbINDICATIVE:IPFV + converbPFV.INTRANSITIVE] and [VerbINDICATIVE:IPFV + ConverbPFV + NPACC,INALIENABLE]. These frames are evaluated in the RNC using the ‘frequency’ function, which quantifies the most recurrent lexical combinations, as well as through randomised samples. The evaluation shows that the proposed construction frames successfully retrieve examples of ‘resultant state’ usage. An analysis of the results reveals that changes in the position of the body and its parts constitute the most frequent semantic content of the retrieved constructions.