Аннотация:The present paper describes a family of Russian constructions on thebasis of parallel corpus data. We focus on the constructional pattern nu i X (literally:well and X). This pattern is a phrasal template with an abundance ofinstances. The two basic groups of nu i N consist of constructions expressingsurprise, bewilderment or admiration, plus these with a negative nuance. Constructionsin both groups have different degrees of idiomaticity ranging fromfull idioms to free word combinations. Another aspect of our investigation concernsthe degree of language specificity of the Russian constructions underanalysis. The higher the degree of language specificity, the more approximate isany way to translate a given unit into another language. Our analysis showsthat the pattern nu i X is a language specific unit of the Russian constructicon,and that the degree of language specificity is more important for bilingual lexicography,teaching of foreign languages and translation studies that the degreeof phraseologicity. For these contrastive purposes it is more effective to describesuch units in terms of Construction Grammar. The empirical data have beencollected from the corpus query system Sketch Engine, subcorpora of paralleltexts OPUS2, and the Russian National Corpus (RNC), subcorpora of paralleltexts.