A Definition is Impossible, Pardon! / A Pardon is Impossible, Define! The Functioning of the Unit v Smysle in Russian Oral Speech (in Terms of Transitivity Theory)

The article analyzes the functioning of the unit v smysle in Russian oral everyday speech. The research is carried out on the user subcorpus (137 contexts), which was based on the speech corpus “One Speaker’s Day”. The analysis shows, that along with the dictionary cases of use (prepositional-case form of a noun, an explanatory union, a derivative preposition), there are some non-canonical cases of use of the form v smysle (pragmatic marker, re-ask, quasi-re-ask) and special transitional cases when it is not possible to unambiguously establish its status. However, the quantitative distribution of these types in the user subcorpus shows that transitional forms are found no less often than the “ordinary” ones (almost a third of the total number of cases). One of the ways to describe the formation of meanings and functions of such units is the scale of transitivity, which allows to highlight the stages of changes and demonstrates a close connection between them and dynamics. The example of unit v smysle let observe how linguistic evolution gradually occurs in the vivid oral speech and, on the contrary, how complex and unique the path of each unit in this process is.