[N[N]] compounds in Russian: A growing family of constructions

Modern Russian contains a significant number of right-headed compounds modeled on Germanic [N[N]] compounds and containing recently borrowed English or German stems. The present article argues that these compounds are a family of partially lexically-specific constructions. Quantitative corpus data from the restricted semantic domain consisting of names of food/drink establishments support this claim by showing that the [N[N]] structure is specifically associated with certain head nouns. The article discusses the relationship between these and related constructions, and suggests motivations for the partial productivity of [N[N]] constructions in Russian.1