Threatening in Russian with or without sja: grozit’ vs. grozit’sja

Abstract

This article explores the two verbs, grozit′ and grozit′sja, which can both be translated as ‘threaten’. We adopt a “local” approach and offer a thorough analysis of corpus data, which indicates that the two verbs, although they share a number of properties, are semantically and syntactically distinct. We show that the two verbs collocate with different parts of speech and tend to occur in different syntactic constructions. Grozit′sja is typically used with regard to interactions between two persons, while grozit′ has a wider range of uses. This tendency has become more pronounced over time. As for the meaning of the verbs, grozit′sja tends to express verbal threats, while grozit′ often conveys non-verbal threats. On a more theoretical level, our study contributes to our understanding of the morpheme sja. While labels like “reflexive”, “middle”, and “passive” are helpful as far as they go, we demonstrate how detailed studies of individual verb pairs (a “local” approach) may shed light on the complex syntactic and semantic properties of sja. On the methodological level, our study underscores the value of corpus data for the study of sja, both data from large internet corpora such as the Araneum Russicum Russicum Maius and the Russian National Corpus (RNC). While the former corpus enables us to identify general tendencies through collocations and semantic vectors, a smaller curated corpus like the RNC is suitable for detailed analysis of semantic and syntactic properties.