8 The Russian Adjective 207having an adverb as predicate and/or as belonging to the 'Category of State'.^8 Postu-
lating such a category appears to be an unwarranted complication. A second sub-
ject factor is that the short form is more likely to be found with subjects denoting
animates than with those denoting inanimates (Iversen 1978: 60-2).
We now move to dependents of the adjective. These are of two types. The pres-
ence of an argument of the adjective strongly favours the short form, as in:
(11) on gotov ko vs-emu
3.SG.MASC ready.(sp)sG.MASC towards everything-sc.DAT
'he is ready for anything'
See Gustavsson (1976: 169) for statistical data. Other modifiers, such as degree
modifiers (e.g. ocen' 'very'), also favour the short form but these have a lesser ef-
fect.
Finally the adjective itself has an influence. This is true in the trivial sense that
if it lacks a form it will be used in the other form. More interestingly, there are
marked lexical effects of two types. First, some adjectives are much more likely to
occur in one form rather than the other. For instance, adjectives, like gotov 'ready',
typically imply a complement even when it is not stated; these adjectives strongly
favour the short form. Gustavsson (1976) demonstrated this convincingly using a
corpus of 7,729 examples from fiction and newspapers from a short time period
(1964-70). Colloquial Russian shows similar lexical effects, together with a shift
away from the short form by comparison with other genres (Krasil'nikova 1973:
196-216). This shift is greater in the dialects, as reported by Mjasnikov (1959). The
second type of lexical effect is that various adjectives differ at least partially in
meaning between long and short form (see Groen 1998:161-5) f°r lists.
The different factors listed are quite likely to be in conflict, which is what makes
the situation complex. When all things are equal—and they rarely are—then we
may recognize the following difference. 'The short form indicates that the sub-
ject, viewed as a unique individual rather than as a type, manifests the property in
potentially variable ways under different circumstances.' (Timberlake 1993: 863).
This fits with its use with complements and degree modifiers. 'The long form sig-
nals that the subject, viewed as a type of individual, instantiates an essence, a qual-
ity' (Timberlake 1993:862). The short form suggests a graded quality, while the long
form implies a categorial judgement. In other words, we may say that short forms
are more like verbs, and long forms are more like nouns (see §7.6), an observation
that goes back at least as far as Fontenoy (1925).
If the long form is selected, then that brings with it the choice of nominative or
(^8) There has been a tradition in linguistics in Russia to recognize a separate category, the category
of state' (kategorija sostojanija). In some versions of this idea, certain items here treated as adjectives
would be assigned to the category of state. The original idea of the category goes back to L. V. Scerba,
and its development is particularly associated with V. V. Vinogradov. I find the arguments unconvinc-
ing: see, for example, Migirin (1970) and Sperber (1972) for discussion. The main argument against
the category is, of course, Occam's Razor.