8 THE RUSSIAN ADJECTIVE: A PERVASIVE YET ELUSIVE CATEGORY
1
Greville G. Corbett- Introduction
Russian undoubtedly has a class of adjectives, and several properties converge to
define the category. While adjectives are numerous, few lexical items have all the
defining properties. There is considerable overlapping with noun and verb, and ad-
jectives expand out to cover typologically unusual areas. We shall see that Russian
adjectives form a category with two focal points.
2 Typological profile of Russian
Russian is a member of the Slavonic family, a fairly conservative branch of Indo-
European. It is synthetic and fusional. Nouns serve as the semantic head of noun
phrases, of certain modifier phrases within the noun phrase, and of copula com-
plements. Verbs head intransitive and transitive predicates. Case is marked on
noun phrases, and verbs agree with subject noun phrases; the language is of the
nominative-accusative type. Within the noun phrase, word order is largely fixed.
In contrast, order within the clause is relatively free, in that it is sensitive to in-
formation structure: given information typically precedes new information. Since
subjects frequently represent given information, subject-verb-object emerges as
the canonical word order. A fine overview of Russian is provided by Timberlake
(i993)> and this is a good pointer to more detailed accounts. For a formal account
of nominal morphology see Corbett and Eraser (1993) and for the verbal morph-
ology see Brown (1998); an exhaustive reference source on inflection is Zaliznjak(^1) The support of the ESRC under grant 11000271235 is gratefully acknowledged. I also wish to
thank Marina Chumakina, loulia Ignatievskaia, and Natalia Rulyova for sharing their intuitions on
various examples, and Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Nicholas Evans, Maria Koptjevskaja-
Tamm, and Carole Tiberius for their comments on a draft. A version of this paper was read at the
International Workshop on Adjective Classes, RCLT, and I thank those present for their comments.
The topic is large, and much of the detailed data and of the previous literature have been omitted in
order to fit the paper into the volume. Russian examples are given in a transliteration of the standard
orthography, which is largely morphophonemic.