Мужик как мужик: Об одной сравнительно-тавтологической конструкции в русском языке

Tautological phraseological constructions have received great attention in Russian linguistic studies since Švedova’s work in 1960. The object of the present paper is the following construction, chosen from a large set of tautological phraseologisms: Мужик как мужик. –Куда же ты это пропадаешь, прокурор…’A man like a man. "Where are you going to go, prosecutor?”’. Basing myself on evidence from an analysis carried out on a large corpus of data from the Russian National Corpus and the ruTenTen11 (Sketch Engine), I aim to show the constructional nature of this kind of phraseological expressions. Resembling a comparative simile–indeed, a prototypical simile «X is Z», which profiles restricted mapping between the two domains involved (see Croft Cruse 2004, 213)–this structure seems to inherit the characteristics of a comparative construction, at the same time modifying it by comparing two identical referents. As a result, I believe that this construction constitutes rather its own group, or family, of constructions linked to different degrees to the comparative construction and displaying in its various instances a whole range of realisations: from the phrasematic construction (endowed with a specific semantic and pragmatic meaning) to wholly frozen, fully idiomatic phrases as in “нет как нет” (no as/like no)’.