Vchera stanovitsja vcheree: non-standard adverbial comparatives in Modern Russian

Borzenko Ye. O. Vchera stanovitsya vchereye: nestandartnyye otadverbialnyye komparativy v sovremennom russkom yazyke. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 555.

This article is devoted to the unusual forms of comparative formed from adverbs in the modern Russian language. Through analysis of the texts of the Internet are revealed the most frequent comparatives of this kind: gorazdee (770 occurrences), davnee (200) and vperedee (from vperedi) (152). Altogether there were discovered non-standard comparatives from 86 adverbs. The total number of such comparatives is 2163. Such forms are formed by addition of the suffix of the comparative -ее/-еj to the base abverb, the last vowel of this adverb (sleva — slevee) and sometimes also the former ending of the noun-base of the adverb (rjadom — rjadee) are truncated. Non-standard comparatives formed from adverbs are in many respects similar in the semantics of graduality to comparatives from qualitative adjectives. All semantic groups of adverbial comparatives correspond to semantic groups of the adverbial comparative forms, and every adverb in the formation of comparative acquires the grading scale: either external (e.g., temporary scale, spatial scale or scale of the necessity) or internal. In the latter case the feature indicated by the adverb, in the form of comparative indicates the greater closeness to the prototype of this feature. If a sign indicated by the adverb originally can be calibrated, the native speaker only overcomes formal restrictions on the formation of comparative (inogdee from inogda). These forms have various syntactical functions in the sentence: for example, quite often they perform the function of the predicate and the adverbial modifier and less often the function of the definition. The number of such comparatives is growing from year to year, which may be a reason to assume that they will soon become standard in the language.