Modulating Meaning: The Landscape of Russian Verbs of Musical Production

Abstract

This article investigates thirteen Russian verbs of musical sound production within a cognitive-linguistic framework, focusing on agentivity, event construal, metaphor, and metonymy. Based on corpus data from the Russian National Corpus, we show that Russian musical verbs form a structured semantic domain organized along two cross-cutting dimensions: orientation (performance-oriented vs. sound-oriented) and degree of agentivity (high vs. low). These dimensions yield four recurrent construal types ranging from intentional musical performance to non-agentive auditory perception. The analysis demonstrates that agentivity is systematically redistributed through metonymic shifts from performer to instrument or musical work. In addition, Russian musical verbs connected to such neighboring semantic domains as non-musical sound, communication, speech, emotion, movement, and staged performance. The study contributes to research on auditory semantics by showing how linguistic meaning emerges through systematic shifts in perspective and construal.