The non-particular word net in everyday oral speech: functional-semantic description

The article contains a functional-semantic description of the word net in Russian oral everyday speech. It is focused on the non-particular (acting as a non-particle) word net (taking into account its collo-quial version netu), which is an inevitable and very frequent element of any everyday oral speech. The source of the material is the Speech Corpus of the Russian Language “One Speaker’s Day” (ORD-corpus). A specific material for the study is a user sub-corpus created by the author and including 347 con-texts from the records of the first six informants of the ORD (more than 75,000 word usages, more than 6.5 hours of speaking). The material is analyzed by means of descriptive and comparative methods, which are traditional for linguistic researches. The analysis has shown that in our everyday oral communication we use not all types of non-particular word net recorded in academic grammars and dictionaries of the Russian language. Only three of its five varieties have been found in the material analyzed: 1) as a predicate (Net de-neg); 2) as a word-sentence, which can be interpreted as an incomplete sentence, in particular in a negative answer to the question (Id’osh’? - Net); 3) as an equivalent, a substitute for a word, a phrase or a sentence when denying (in opposition) (Budesh’ ili net?). Two more codified («dictionary») types of non-particular net have not been found in the material under study: 4) as a concessive conjunction (Zhivi v dovol’stve, bezo-bidno! - Da net: ja vzdumal revnovat’); 5) as a noun, mainly in various colloquial collocations (svesti na net, na net i suda net, pirot s netom i pod). Following M. Tomasello, who proposed the usage-based approach to grammar, the author of the article describes all typical features of the use of the non-particular word net in Russian oral everyday speech and gives its generalized functional-semantic description.