‘Ona ni razu ne Zolushka’: on one comparative-and-evaluative construction of modern Russian speech

The study deals with the phraseologized comparative-and-evaluative syntactic construction (P ni razy ne N1) (which can be translated as (P is not at all N1)) (Tol’ko padcheritsa byla ni razu ne Zolushka i spat’ v yashchike s zoloj sebe ne pozvol’ala, i. e., But the stepdaughter was not at all Cinderella and did not sleep in a box with cinders). The paper analyzes the functioning of the construction in modern everyday speech and identifies its characteristic features. In the structure of this construction two objects of comparison are necessarily present, so the verb simply cannot be placed after the phraseologized element ni razy ne. During the comparison, object P is evaluated against the background of N1. The construction can carry both evaluative (Ya, konechno, ni razu ne pisatel’, i. e., I am definitely not at all a writer) and comparative- evaluative meaning (Pattison, imkho, voobshche, ni razu ne D’urua, i. e., IMHO Pattison is not at all Duroy). The peculiarity of the comparative seme is the implicit and explicit expression of the feature of comparison. Since the construction in question is primarily evaluative, it is common to use the figure of the author as one of the objects. The syntactic scheme is not limited to the form (P ni razy ne N1): the study revealed a number of ‘expanders’ that can vary the construction. The adverb voobshche is the most common such element (Gonkong voobshche ni razu ne London). In combination with the unit in question, speakers of the Russian language often use introductory words and word combinations that express the speaker's attitude to what is said. The study revealed the cases of using introductory units of the following types: credibility, emotion, and evaluation of the style of the statement. The considered construction is a grammatical basis of a sentence in which the nominative part of the predicate is expressed by a noun in the nominative case (N1), so among the ‘expanders’ there are particles such as vot and eto.