Adjective Classes - A Cross-Linguistic Typology

8 The Russian Adjective 203

owing to pervasive syncretisms. The most interesting of these concerns the accu-
sative case, where for the masculine singular and for the plural the form is identi-
cal to the accusative for animates and to the nominative for inanimates. For a for-
mal account of this syncretism, which goes over paradigm boundaries, see Corbett
and Eraser (1993), and for the typological implications see Corbett, Baerman, and
Brown (2002). In addition, the masculine and neuter are identical in the oblique
cases and the feminine does not distinguish the oblique cases (the instrumental in-
flection -oju is now largely limited to poetry for adjectives). If we exclude this lat-
ter form, there are twelve distinct inflections, with surprisingly the masculine/neu-
ter instrumental singular being identical to the dative plural. These syncretisms are
brought out in (6):

(6) The paradigm of the long form adjective novyj 'new' (showing syncretisms)

Feminine Neuter Masculine Plural

Nominative

Accusative

Genitive

Locative

Dative

Instrumental

novaja

novuju

novoj

novoj(u)

novyj novye

novoe

as NOM/GEN

novogo

novom

novomu

novym

novyx

novym

novymi

Long form adjectives are predictable: each adjective has all the forms, and the na-
tive speaker has no problem in producing them. They have fixed stress, typically
on the stem, as with novyj 'new', less commonly on the ending. Adjectives are in-
flectionally considerably more regular than nouns or verbs in Russian. The impor-
tance of the patterns of syncretism is that they are preserved even for other items
which are not canonical adjectives; thus etot 'this' is of irregular inflection, but it
has the same 'pattern as in (6).
Russian has a second set of forms, the so-called short form (now restricted to
predicative use, as discussed in §7.1 below):

(7) The paradigm of the short form adjective nov 'new'

Masculine Feminine Neuter Plural

nov nova novo novy

Short forms do not distinguish case. Unlike the long forms, they can have differ-
ent stress patterns. In many instances there are alternative stresses for particular
forms, as with the plural of nov 'new' in (7) above, and there are considerable un-

of the regularity of the paradigm. Some information on the acquisition of the adjectival forms can
be found in Voeykova (1997).