Micro-syntax cross-linguistically

Project: The present bilateral cooperation is concerned with grammatical phenomena located at the borderline between lexicon and syntax and thus belonging to the area of the so-called microsyntax. This project investigates the monolingual idiomaticity in a multilingual mode of language use, in particular, the comprehensibility of (Russian) microsyntactic phenomena to speakers of mutually intelligible (Slavic) languages. The linguistic units embrace non-compositional (idiomatic and semi-idiomatic) multiword entities which are at the same time grammatically idiosyncratic and therefore require specific rules for adequate representation. Our practical objective is to design a comprehensive on-line resource encompassing the multitude of conventionalised multi-word combinations cross-linguistically. The output of the contrastive analyses will shape a core Slavic micro-syntactic database to be used both for educational purposes and language-technology applications. The Slavic microsyntactic resources will be developed in conjunction with cognitive and didactic experiments. The idea that microsyntactic phenomena and entities can be used in didactic, cognitive and typological tasks is truly novel and has not been explored before.