Russian Free Phrasal Indefinite Pronouns

The paper describes Russian phrasal indefinite pronouns: both 1) phraseologized (= collocational), such as koe-kto ≈ ‘someone’, Bog znaet kto ‘God knows who’, kto ugodno ‘whoever’ or kto by to ni bylo ‘no matter who’, and 2) free, such as {Ja vstretil} nikto iz tvoix druzej ne dogadaetsja kogo ‘{I met} none of your friends will guess whom’ (a.k.a. syntactic amalgams). Three lexical entries are presented: for the indefinite pronominal lexeme kto1 ≈ ‘-body; -one’, for the premodifying indefiniteness type marker idiom ˹Bog znaet˺ ‘God knows’, and for the postmodifying indefiniteness type marker particle -to4 ≈ ‘some’. Formal representations of collocational and free phrasal indefinite pronouns at three levels of linguistic representation (semantic, deep-syntactic and surface-syntactic) are given, as well as rules for constructing both types of pronouns.