ИСТИНА

The aim of the present study is to analyze a specific example of the lexicalization process of a relatively productive construction. According to one of the fundamental principles of Construction Grammar, properties of linguistic expressions such as idiomaticity, fixedness and non-compositionality should be viewed as a matter of degree. The data for the investigation are Russian expressions based on the patterns хоть Х, хоть Y and хоть Х, хоть не Х. Although most instances of these patterns are fully compositional, we consider the underlying schemas to be constructions, because “patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long as they occur with sufficient frequency” (Goldberg 2006, 5). The empirical data have been collected from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) and Sketch Engine, subcorpus ruTenTen (2011). These constructions are realized in a wide variety of tokens with slot fillers belonging to different parts of speech – noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, numeral, etc.