8 The Russian Adjective 213the examples), but will focus on two areas of special interest: the COLOUR type,
since Russian has proved of great typological interest here, and on the addition-
al semantic types found in Russian adjectives which are rarely found in adjective
inventories.^1110.1. DIMENSION
The most versatile here are bol'soj 'big' and malen'kij small'. The latter includes the
diminutive suffix -en'k-, which limits its derivational possibilities. The underived
form malyj is still in use, and is relatively frequent (it is ranked 1,016 in Sharoff s
20023 list), though less so than malen'kij (ranked 224). Since malyj has an unprob-
lematic stem, it is used, for instance, for forming the short form of malen'kij. Other
members include: dlinnyj 'long', korotkij 'short', sirokij 'wide', uzkij 'narrow', glubokij
'deep', melkij 'shallow', vysokij 'high, tall', nizkij 'low, short'. See Apresjan (1992:43-5,
74-7) for discussion of the difference between the antonymic pairs. And for a con-
trastive study of these adjectives in Russian, English, and German, see Sharoff
(2OO2b).10.2. AGE
Novyj 'new', molodoj 'young', staryj 'old' (that is, both 'not new' and 'not young').10.3. VALUEXorosij good',ploxoj 'bad', uzasnyj 'awful', otiicnyj 'excellent', nastojasciij 'real', stran-
nyj 'odd, strange', neobxodimyj 'essential', vaznyj 'important'.
10.4. COLOUR
Russian is of special interest, because of its relevance to typological work on col-
our terms. This was stimulated by Berlin and Kay (1969), one of the few typologic-
al works devoted to lexical semantics. They proposed a hierarchy of basic colour
terms (1969: 5):
(26) The Berlin and Kay Hierarchy
PURPLE
WHITE GREEN PINK
< RED < < BLUE < BROWN <
BLACK YELLOW ORANGE
GREY
The hierarchy constrains the possible inventories of basic colour terms in that the
presence of any given term implies the existence of all those to the left (thus a
language with a basic term for YELLOW will have basic terms for WHITE, BLACK,
and RED). For revisions to the hierarchy, see Kay, Berlin, and Merrifield (1991) and
references there. Russian has an exceptional colour inventory, with two basic terms(^1) ' Traditional Russian grammar draws a semantic distinction between qualitative' and 'relational'
adjectives. For some problems associated with this, see Isacenko (1954: 233-6).