Our circle is hour by hour thinning out: on diachrony of semantics and collocations of the construction čas ot času

In the article, the evolution of semantics and collocations of the construction čas ot času ‘hour by hour’ is considered within the framework of Diachronic Construction Grammar. This construction belongs to the type X ot X-a ‘X by X’ with the temporal meaning (den’ oto dnja ‘day by day’, god ot goda ‘year by year’, etc.), but is subject to semantic processes that do not occur with other constructions of the series. In particular, it has undergone pragmaticalization and has evolved into a pragmatic marker of negative assessment of a course of events. Based on the analysis of the corpus data, the article traces the etymology of the construction čas ot času, its origin by accretion from the earlier construction ot času, by analogy with the construction den’ oto dnja ‘day by day’, and its semantic alignment with the latter, with the development of the general model X ot X-a.