Notes
This paper was written in Los Angeles, CA, where we stayed in early 1990 under Melčuk's John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. We hereby express our heartfelt gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which made this stay possible, as well as to the administration of the Linguistics Department at UCLA, who provided us with all the facilities necessary for conducting our research pleasantly and successfully.
A number of people contributed to the final form of this paper. Alexander Zholkovsky read the first draft, and his sharp remarks and provocative suggestions have been instrumental in improving the quality of our presentation; Jurij Apresjan, Konstantin Bogatyrëv, Klaudia Dobrina, Nikolaj Pertsov, Alain Polguère, Maria Polinsky, Alexander Tchékhov and Anna Zaliznjak went through the subsequent versions; Lisette Frigo and Anna Wierzbicka corrected our English. We highly appreciate their friendly help and we tried, to the best of our abilities, to take their objections and constructive proposals into consideration. All the mistakes and omissions that remained are of course our own responsibility.