Resumen de The grammar of surprise: the Russian construction of the type "Kowka e3rna da yMepna" 'Suddenly, the cat died'
Contemporary Russian has a construction composed of the verb 'to take' and a second verb V2. Both verbs manifest identical grammatical categories, they are linked either by syndetic (with a conjunction meaning 'and') or asyndetic coordination or else they are serialized, and the meaning of the whole construction is roughly speaking 'to suddenly V2'. In the paper I will first examine the formal and semantic properties of the construction, next discuss some criteria which support an analysis in terms of grammaticalization theory including additional pragmatic effects, and finally tackle the question how to model these facts in a dependency framework of the MTT type.
