Hybrid ‘sledom’ follows in Area of Interaction of Nouns and Adverbs: Semantics and Grammar

This article presents the results of a study on the process and outcome of the stepwise adverbialization of the instrumental case of nouns in the Russian. The relevance of this work is underscored by the attention to the interaction between grammatical and semantic aspects within lexical units subject to transposition at the level of parts of speech. The aim of the article is to elucidate the specifics of hybrid structures formed as a result of the functional adverbialization of nouns in the instrumental case. The material used consists of contexts from the Russian National Corpus featuring substantive word forms like ‘sledom’, demonstrating various stages of adverbialization. An interdisciplinary approach is employed, utilizing methods of oppositional analysis, indexing, linguistic experimentation, as well as elements of componential and distributional analysis. Using the word form ‘sledom’ as a case study, the primary stages of adverbial transposition of nouns in Russian are identified. The analysis reveals that within the hybrid zone, the word form ‘sledom’ exhibits 55 % correspondence with the features of its original noun (‘sled’) and 60 % correspondence with the characteristics of a core adverb (‘sledom’). Lexicalization of the word form at this stage of adverbialization is not observed; it continues to function within the semantic domain of the original substantive lexeme. The significance of this research lies in its contribution to the development of a general theory of transitivity and syncretism in the grammatical structure of language, as well as the potential application of the proposed methods of oppositional analysis and indexing in studying other types of transpositional transformations within the system of parts of speech in the Russian.