The “Diachronicon” database: history, aims, structure

This paper introduces “Diachronicon” — a resource detailing diachronic changes in Russian constructions. We understand the term “constructions” as frequent, partially idiomatic sequences of linguistic units, words in this case, that lie at the intersection of lexis and grammar [Fillmore et al. 1988]. The intricacies of their behavior in modern Russian are described in the “Russian Constructicon” database [Janda et al. 2023; Orlov et al. 2023], which is designed so as to enable their comparison to analogous constructions of other languages. The “Diachronicon” database and several following papers in this issue, written by the developers of the resource, examine the constructions described in “Russian Constructicon” from a historical viewpoint as well as in the typological aspect.