CAPTURING THE RUSSIAN ADJECTIVE

Abstract

This chapter focuses on capturing of the Russian adjective. In Russian, there are two forms of qualitative adjective, namely, the long form and the short form. The short form is used in predicate position only, while the long form may be used in predicate position or prenominally as an attributive adjective. The morphological process that relates the two forms is so transparently productive that nearly every qualitative adjective may be said to have both forms, although one or the other may rarely or never be used owing to semantic considerations. Regular adjectives behave differently from the participles in that long-form adjectives may appear in predicate position. Scientific laws and similar statements invariably contain short-form adjectives or verbs, and not long-form adjectives, in predicate position. Sentences with infinitives or certain quantifier phrases as subjects also disallow long forms in the predicate. Many of the syntactic peculiarities of short forms have been presented as similarities to verbs. The absolute-relative distinction between short- and long-form adjectives helps explain the fact that predicate adjectives in scientific laws and in sentences with certain kinds of abstract subjects must be in their short forms. A grammar like Montague's predicts that the syntactic and semantic facts will coincide in this sort of way. The syntax and semantics work side by side in such a way that any two expressions that are the same syntactically will be the same semantically, though not necessarily vice versa. Identical complex semantic types that differ syntactically are distinguished by varying the number of slashes between the components of their syntactic categories.