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.
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Valentina Benigni (2026) studied this question.
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