The Semantics of Verbs to come, to happen in the Light of a Parallel Corpus

At the first sight, Russian verbs nastat’, nastupit’ and prijti in their temporal meaning (all of them are usually translated as ‘to come’ or ‘to happen’ though obviously a range of other variants exists) express the same situation. In fact, despite belonging to the same semantic class of the verbs of ‘beginning’ and having many essential features in common, they seem to vary significantly when it comes to word compatibility. That is an indication that these verbs have some complex and deeply underlying differences between them. This paper mainly aims to discover these differences by using lexicographic and frame methods, besides, it will be essential to compare the organization of the semantic field of ‘beginning’ in Russian and in English with the aid of data from dictionaries and parallel corpora (most notably the subcorpus of RNC, Russian National Corpus), the outcome of such a comparison, as I see it, not solely will make a contribution to the research connected to the phasal verbs in general and to the semantic field of ‘beginning’, but also will have a chance to clarify reasons standing behind the emergence of complexities with the usage of verbs of this class for foreigners studying Russian.