8 The Russian Adjective 211The data argue in favour of a continuum from verb to noun, with the short form
closer to the verb and the long form closer to the noun. Given the special nature
of honorific pronouns, it is preferable to find confirming data from some other
controller type. This has been done, within a wider account of agreement (Cor-
bett 1983:166-72).
8. Adjectives as a canonical category
We have now assembled the essential data. If we review the five characteristics
given in §3, then we have seen clear evidence that these are indeed characteristics
of adjectives. Yet relatively few adjectives have all the properties. The main prob-
lem is the short form. As we saw in §5, many adjectives do not have a short form,
and for some which do, its status is uncertain. There are signs of this inflectional
category becoming lexicalized.
Given the status of the short form, an obvious idea would be to omit it from the
list of criteria for canonical adjectives. However, rad glad' has only the short form
(though the rise of the long form means that sporadic instances of a long form
appear; see Gustavsson 1976: 66). This is the clearest example; for other candidates
see Ilola and Mustajoki (1989:116). Moreover, there is an important group (around
a score) which are very frequent in use, which are used mainly in the short form.
The group includes: gotov 'ready' ('for something' k plus dative or na plus accu-
sative or 'to do something' infinitive), dovolen 'satisfied' ('with something' instru-
mental case), nameren 'intending' ('to do something' infinitive). As we have seen
(§7.4), these adjectives take various sorts of second argument. We would not wish
to exclude these frequent items from the category. Note that it is precisely the syn-
tactic characteristic of taking two arguments, rather than their semantic grouping,
which distinguishes these adjectives (see Evans 2000:104 for a similar point about
the salient difference of kinship verbs).
We have to recognize, therefore, that the adjective category in Russian shows
a partial split, with some members being more noun-like and others more verb-
like. Some adjectives bridge the gap, but those with all the canonical properties
form a small proportion. We have an interesting category where the criteria are
clear but the canonical members are few in number. Given that the category is
structured in this way, it is also interesting to note that there is the 'opposite' prob-
lem, that is there are items with several of the canonical properties but which are
unusual adjectives from a cross-linguistic perspective. We consider these 'outliers'
in §§10.14-10.16 and §11.
9 Usage
To see how adjectives are distributed as types in the lexicon, we may calculate
data from Lazova (1974: 944) a reverse dictionary, covering 121,532 words. An