On syntactic selection of adjective (phrases)

The paper proposes an analysis of the syntactic structure of nominal predication in Russian, in particular, of nominal predication with adjectives. We analyze a number of semantic and distributive properties that distinguish nominal predications with short and long adjectival forms. The main issue raised in the paper is the syntactic status of Russian (long form) adjectives in the structure of nominal predications. We consider in detail the so-called attributive approach to the derivation of nominal predications with long form adjectives, i.e. undertake an analysis that derives predicative adjectives from noun phrases. We discuss some critical views on this approach and propose a mechanism by which predicative adjectives get the values of grammatical features relevant to them. The aspects of adjectival grammar important for our study are agreement and semantic role assignment. We also investigate different distributional constraints differentiating adjectival modification and predication. We show that the mechanisms that stand behind the predicative use in the case of short and long form adjectives differ in many respects. Clause structures with the two forms also vary crucially. The paper proposes an approach that makes it possible to eliminate the shortcomings inherent in attributive analyses of predicative long forms. The most important problem addressed in the paper is evaluation of the “projection potential” of adjectives as a separate grammatical category. We also discuss the parallelism between Russian short form adjectives and stative predicates in languages that lack an adjectival class. Russian short forms turn out to be similar to stative verbs in that they pattern with verbs with respect to semantic role assignment, featural composition and agreement.