Sense of Humor – «Comedy Club» is Resting: One Stable Evaluative Structure in Russian

The article is devoted to the description of a syntactically stable evaluative construction (syntactic phraseme) <P – N1 is resting>, not fixed in the normative lexicographic sources (This is a local movie star with ambition. – Sharon Stone otdykhaet (is resting); 82,000 viewers <…> – Madonna otdykhaet!). P is the subject, attribute, or circumstance at the head of the comparison, and N1 is the component with which P is compared. The ironical is meaning behind this construction is that N1 much more inferior and meaningless compared to P, whereas it is obvious that it is not true. The author considers the meanings of the verb otdykhat’ (to rest) in different types of dictionaries, which illustrates its use as part of a similar construction. The article pays attention to various approaches and, accordingly, to terminology related to the grammar of constructions. The paper raises a nominative problem of the model. Particular attention is paid to the variants of the nomination in position N1, which are presented in the sequential classification. Examples of such syntactic phrases from the National Corpus of the Russian Language, the media and everyday oral speech (speech practice) of Russian speakers served as material for a specific analysis. All this material is considered as elements of creative linguistics, and the above mentioned observations can be useful in lexicographic practice, linguodidactics (especially in teaching Russian as a foreign language), in translation practice, as well as in the theoretical understanding of transitional cases between vocabulary and syntax, which have a certain idiomaticity and statistical reproducibility.