“Nynešnie moi soparkniki, sokurortniki, sostakanniki”
Productivity of the Russian Derivational Construction [so+X-nik] in Nonce Nouns
Abstract
This article investigates the productivity of the Russian derivational construction [so-X-nik] in the formation of nonce nouns. Adopting a constructionist perspective and a corpus-based approach, the study analyzes data from the Russian Trends corpus, a web-based monitoring corpus of journalistic texts, and the media subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus, focusing on the co-participative and deictic semantics of the pattern. The findings show that, beyond lexicalized forms (e.g. sotrudnik ‘collaborator’, sovremennik ‘contemporary’), the construction remains productive in creating low-frequency and occasional formations whose interpretation depends on contextual anchoring and shared knowledge. Particular attention is paid to plural marking in the formation of ad hoc categories and to the construction’s productive use in wordplay and expressive strategies in contemporary journalistic discourse.
Submitted: Jan. 8, 2026 | Accepted: July 26, 2026 | Published Oct. 14, 2026 | Language: en
Keywords Co-participative meaning • Deictic morphology • Construction Grammar • Nonce nouns • Russian derivational morphology • Potential productivity • Ad hoc categorization
Copyright © 2026 Valentina Benigni. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/BES/2785-3187/2026/01/002