The Russian vsё ravno revisited

The article offers an analysis of the polysemy structure of the Russian syntactic phraseme vsё ravno. I propose to distinguish two classes of this unit’s uses — the predicative use, in which it has two valencies (a dative subject and an object complement clause) and expresses “absence of difference”, and the connective use, in which vsё ravno marks the logical relation between two situations established by the speaker. Depending on the nature of this relation in the connective use, two meanings are distinguished: “contrary to expectation” and “an argument”. The phrasemes vsё odno and vsё edino, which are quasi-synonymous with vsё ravno, are also considered. The typological significance of the semantic shifts that underlie the polysemy of the linguistic units in question is confirmed based on the Database of semantic shifts in the languages of the world (DatSemShift).