Nikita Muravyev (HSE University) Light verbs as a missing link in grammaticalization: a case study of Russian posture verbs and a brief typological overview

Posture verbs frequently undergo grammaticalization across languages. In the literature, their typical grammaticalization path is described as developing from literal posture use to an aspectual marker and/or a locative or existential copula. However, what is often overlooked is the wide range of light verb constructions (LVCs) — idiomatic expressions consisting of a semantically bleached verb and a predicatively used syntactic constituent (usually NP or PP), e.g. German unter Druck stehen ‘be (lit. stand) under pressure’ or Russian sidet’ na diete ‘be (lit. sit) on a diet’. In this talk, drawing on Russian corpus data, I demonstrate that such uses cannot simply be treated as ordinary copular constructions, as they convey more specific meanings rooted in residual semantic components of posture. I argue that these meanings are quasi-grammatical and pre-grammatical, in that they reflect a lower degree of grammaticalization and possibly represent an intermediate stage in the diachronic development of posture verbs. Finally, I briefly compare posture-based LVCs across twelve Eurasian languages and discuss their typological variation.