The pragmatics of implicit evaluativeness of phraseological units: a corpus-discourse analysis of the expression ‘iz ryada von’ (vykhodyashchiy) (‘out of the ordinary’)
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2026-2-9
- Pages
- 167-186
Abstract
The article examines the pragmatic and semantic mechanisms underlying the discursive realisation of implicit evaluativeness in Russian idioms. The aim of the study is to identify the implicit positive or negative evaluative meanings of phraseological units whose evaluative connotations are not recorded in dictionaries but emerge through their immediate and broader contextual environment. The analysis focuses on the idiom ‘iz ryada von’ (vykhodyashchiy) (Eng.‘out of the ordinary’) and its reduced variant ‘iz ryada von’. The research procedure is based on the author’s methodology of content-based and quantitative corpus-discourse analysis. The material includes lexicographic definitions of these expressions in the major Russian explanatory and phraseological dictionaries, as well as usage contexts extracted by continuous sampling from the main corpus of the Russian National Corpus. The quantitative analysis is based on the first 100 occurrences of the target expressions in the corpus. The core semantics of the idiom involves the idea of exceptional qualities, properties, or characteristics of a person or object. A preliminary analysis of dictionary definitions showed that neither the definitional zone, nor stylistic labels and the implications of the definitional components contain any indication of evaluative meaning. The only information provided is general expressiveness and stylistic restriction, namely, their association with colloquial speech. However, corpus analysis revealed a clear predominance of contexts with negative evaluative colouring. In other words, in actual usage by native speakers of Russian, the expression ‘iz ryada von’ (vykhodyashchiy) is rarely used to describe someone or something genuinely valuable or exclusively positive, particularly in moral or spiritual terms. The study concludes that the semantic drift of this phraseological unit towards implicit negative evaluativeness may be determined by national and cultural factors.