2oo Greville G. Corbett
(1977). Aspect is tackled in Comrie (1976) and Timberlake (1985). For word order,
see Yokoyama (1986) and for agreement see Corbett (1998). Developments over the
twentieth century are traced in Comrie, Stone, and Polinsky (1996).
3 Canonical Russian adjectives
A canonical or 'ideal' Russian adjective has the following properties:
Syntactic
- it occurs as the complement of a copula;
- it occurs as a modifier in noun phrases.
These properties are discussed in §4.1.
Morphological
- it has a regular paradigm (the long form), which allows agreement in gender (in-
cluding the sub-gender of animacy), number, and case; - it also has a paradigm for use in the predicate (the short form);
- it has a (synthetic) comparative.
These properties are discussed in §5.
4 Identifying the adjective (syntax and sources)
We examine the syntactic means for identifying adjectives, and then look at the
sources of the category.
4.1. THE SYNTAX OF CANONICAL ADJECTIVES
In general it is relatively unproblematic to identify a class of adjectives in Rus-
sian. In terms of syntax, typical members of the class occur as the complement of
a copula:
(1) Ded byl dobr-ym
grandfather was.MASC.sc kind-(Lp)MASC.SG.iNST
grandfather was kind'
Uppsala corpus, text XDLIOIOI
We examine the use of the long form (LF) vs. short form (SF) in §7.1 below. Note
that the verb byt' 'be' is not normally expressed in the present tense, and so the
complement appears without a copula:
(2) Katja ocen' krasiv-aja
Katja very beautiful-(LF)FEM.SG.NOM
'Katja is very beautiful'
Zemskaja (1973: 248) example from conversation
This property is shared with noun phrases and it suggests that Russian adjectives