This database contains Russian nouns beginning with the string spec from the Russian National Corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru), such as specoperacija ‘special operation’. The database was created in the following way. First, we searched for all lemmas beginning with spec in the part of the main corpus containing non-fiction (nexudozhestvennaja literatura) and created a list of all the head words (e.g., operacija). Second, we identified the number of attestations for each word and included this information in the list. Third, we searched for the full adjectives special’nyj and specializirovannyj immediately followed by the head words (e.g., special’naja operacija and specializirovannaja operacija). The number of attestations for each combination of adjective and noun was included in the list. The corpus searches were carried out in 2022. In the database, the words are given in Cyrillic.

Abstract from article: This study presents an in-depth analysis of Russian stub compounds in spec ‘special’ and their competition with the corresponding full adjective special’nyj ‘special’ followed by a noun. Couched in Construction Morphology the corpus-based analysis addresses four understudied areas in theoretical and Russian morphology: shortening mechanisms, competition between morphological words and multiword expressions, blocking, and compounding in Russian. It is argued that shortening mechanisms create words that are more than stylistic variants of the corresponding longer constructions, although full synonymy may occur under specific conditions. The diachronic and synchronic motivation of the shortening mechanism under scrutiny is analyzed in terms of economy, extravagance and expressiveness. Blocking is demonstrated to be statistical (involving tendencies rather than categorical rules) and bidirectional, whereby a morphological construction may be favored over a syntactic construction and vice versa. The proposed analysis adds to the knowledge of stub compounds in Russian and demonstrates how a wide variety of generalizations can be adequately accounted for in Construction Morphology.