Preposition doubling

[Oscar E Swan]

In Polish, ad-hoc nominalization is common with pronominal adjectives, as
in Kup mi tamten. 'Buy me that other one.' The ad hoc nominalization of
adjectives, which is what, in my opinion, you are seeing in Russian, is
much less common, but see the folk song, Szla dzieweczka do
laseczka do zielonego, do zielonego, do zielonego... (a usage which I
believe comes across as naive and amusing).

I would guess that the phenomenon would correlate strongly with the ease
of forming adjectival nouns of the sort bulocnaja, stolovaja, borzaja,
sampanskoe, and so on. This word-formative strategy is also not
extensively exploited in Polish. It is as though the pronominal adjective
j-, historically part of the Russian adjectival endings, were still
latently there and can be activated more or less at will.

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Oscar E. Swan   Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures
1417 Cathedral of Learning   Univ. of Pittsburgh  15260
412-624-5707      swan+ at pitt.edu
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