This study examines, for the purpose of comparison, the semantic content of several important prepositions in modern Russian which translate ‘about, concerning’. It focuses primarily on the two primary prepositions o+LOC and pro, and includes the two secondary prepositions nas¿¿et and po povodu, which also translate ‘about, concerning’. Historically, several scholars have acknowledged that o+LOC and pro express slightly different nuances, although the exact nature of these nuances has become less clear over time (Pe¿¿kovskij 1928/2001, Vinogradov 1947/2001). How has pro survived and remained productive, if the distinction between it and o+LOC has been fading for so long? Vinogradov predicted its demise in the 1940’s, yet it still enjoys a robust presence in both the spoken and written language of the present day. Furthermore, pro in the ‘about’ sense is historically neither rare nor limited to the recent past. Likewise, nas¿¿et and po povodu (both fairly recent additions to the stable of Russian prepositions), which have both undergone subtle lexical shifts of their own in the past few centuries (¿¿erkasova 1967), are also in need of a more articulated semantic description.
In this study, which consists of both a qualitative and a quantitative study, I have identified several selectional restrictions—the types of verbs and nouns (and features within them) with which these prepositions occur—associated with the four ‘aboutness’ prepositions, in sample texts written between 1890 and 2009, from the Russian National Corpus. The quantitative study consists of Fisher’s Exact tests performed on approximately 7,000 tokens (which consist of argument phrases with the ‘aboutness’ prepositions). Results indicate that in many instances, pro is associated with nouns which are animate, proper, unmodified, and non-deverbal.
A qualitative analysis of the types of verbs associated with ‘aboutness’ PP’s as complements reveals that pro is mostly limited to verbs whose ‘aboutness’ object referent codes the semantic role of Topic. In contrast, with verbs that depict an emotional state (bespokoit’sja ‘be worried’, etc.), the object referent codes the semantic role of Cause; with verbs that depict requesting or supplication (prosit’ ‘ask (for), request’, umoljat’ ‘beseech’, etc.) the object referent codes the role of Proposition. Object referents of pro, however, rarely occur in these semantic roles, being generally limited to the semantic role of Topic; the verbs with which such a referent is associated depict one or more parts of the signal path of a message—speaking, writing, reading, inquiring, hearing (about), or cognitive activity. The performing of activities associated with a Topic object referent do not entail a change of state in any of the participants in the discourse, as is the case with emotional states and requests.
I have also examined ‘co-occurrence’ examples, in which o+LOC and pro PP’s occur in the same syntagma or sentence, both subordinate to the same verb. Close readings of these co-occurrences show that in many of them, the semantic/pragmatic opposition between the o+LOC and pro object referents is such that the former are presented as being larger in scope, and more analyzed than the pro entities.