Towards the Description of Multiword Units in Russian Everyday Speech: State-of-the-Art and the Methodology of Further Research

Multiword unites constitute a broad category encompassing different linguistic phenomena, which include compounds, idioms, colligations, and collocations. The nature of these units is distinguished by lexical (semantic), syntactic, or statistical idiosyncrasy. Due to their peculiarities, namely, the non-compositional nature of the meaning, they pose a problem when developing various linguistic models for syntactic annotation, grammar modeling, automatic text processing, information extraction, and other practical linguistic tasks. The research presented in this chapter is done in the framework of the large project aimed at large-scale description of the system, the structure and functioning of multiword units in everyday Russian speech, which has the following objectives: (1) development of a typology and theoretical description of multiword units, (2) building a database of these units and describing the quantitative characteristics of their use obtained on natural speech material, and (3) the compilation of the materials for the “Dictionary of multiword units of everyday Russian speech.” The chapter describes the notion of multiword units, reviews the most well-known approaches to their study, and proposes the methodology of their further research based on transcripts of everyday Russian speech.