8 The Russian Adjective 219are derived from monomorphemic personal names—as possessive adjectives—
and some from place names (Unbegaun 1972: 26-34). The well-known names in
-skij are just one type.12 Conclusion
There are five characteristics of canonical adjectives in Russian. A canonical ad-
jective occurs as the complement of a copula and as a modifier in noun phrases
(the two syntactic properties); furthermore, it has a regular long form paradigm,
a paradigm for use in the predicate (the short form) and a synthetic comparative
(the three morphological properties). However, while adjectives are numerous, few
of them have all the characteristics of canonical adjectives. We observed consid-
erable overlapping of adjectives with nouns and verbs, and they have additional
functions which are typologically unusual. The distribution of adjectives varies re-
markably according to genre. Rather than forming a homogeneous category, Rus-
sian adjectives have two focal points. Some occur primarily in the predicate, and
have a second argument; these are the more verb-like adjectives, which typically
occur in the short form. Other adjectives favour attributive position, where they
occur in the long form; these are more noun-like and many of them are derived
adjectives. Thus Russian has many adjectives, but the category cannot be pinned
down as clustering around a single focal point.
Sources for examples
The Uppsala Corpus comprises some 600 Russian texts, with a million words of running
text, half literary prose and half non-fiction. The time span is 1960-89. More details
can be found at http://www.slaviska.uu.se/korpdesc.htm
Serge SharofFs The frequency dictionary for Russian is based on about 40 million words of
modern prose (fiction and non-fiction) from the period 1970-2002. It is available at
http://www.artint.ru/projects/frqlist/frqlist-en.asp
BORSCEV, V. B. 2001. Za jazykom (Dagestan, Tuva, Abxazija: Dnevniki lingvisticeskix eks-
pedicij). Moscow: Azbukovnik.
SUKSIN, V. M. 1980. Rasskazy. Moscow: Moskovskij rabocij.References
APRESJAN, Y. D. 1992. Lexical semantics: User's guide to contemporary Russian vocabu-
lary. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Publishers. [Translation of Ju. D. Apresjan 1974.
Leksiceskaja semantika: sinonimiceskie sredstva jazyka. Moscow: Nauka. Edited by
Alexander Eulenberg.]
BABBY, L. 1975. A transformational grammar of Russian adjectives. The Hague: Mouton.
BERLIN, B. and KAY, P. 1969. Basic colour terms: their universality and evolution. Baltimore:
University of California Press.
BRAUER, H. 1986. 'Die possessiven Adjektiva auf -ov und -in des Russischen der Gegenwart
und ihre Possessivitat: Teil I', Zeitschriftfur Slavische Philologie 46.51-139.