Nomi sintagmatici in russo

Russian is a language with a very rich lexeme-formation system. Besides strictly morphological mechanisms (derivation and compounding), the Russian language also displays a wide number of so-called “phrasal lexemes”, namely constructions that have a phrasal structure, but are lexical in nature. These constructions are attested in a number of languages and can belong to different word classes, thus creating phrasal nouns, phrasal verbs, and so on. In this contribution we discuss the notion of “phrasal lexeme” and then concentrate on the identification and analysis of the main types of phrasal nouns in Russian. We single out at least four productive patterns for the creation of these phrasal nouns, distinguishing them formally from free phrases and nominal compounds. The single patterns are then described in more detail, from both a qualitative and a quantitative viewpoint, with the aid of data from corpora of contemporary Russian.