Surrey Database of Short Term Morphosyntactic Change: Predicate adjectives

The notion of 'short term morphosyntactic change' can be used to characterise changes
in the use of forms in a short period of time even when the forms themselves have
changed relatively little. The Short Term Morphosyntactic Change (STMC) Databases
explore change in six different morphosyntactic phenomena in Russian over a 200 year
period from 1801-2000.

A predicate adjective may take one of three forms: the short form (SF), the long form
nominative (LF-N) or the long form instrumental (LF-I). Each of these adjectival forms shows number, and in the singular also
gender (those in our examples are singular and masculine). The database reflects the
very interesting situation which has arisen at the end of a development reaching back
to Common Slavonic. Originally the adjective had only short forms. Over the
centuries, the long form (first nominative, and later also instrumental) has gained
ground (see Larsen 2005). Previous corpus studies (for example, Gustavsson 1976)
have documented this ongoing change. In current Russian, there are several factors in
play, which the user can investigate: the type of subject, the type of verb, the type
of adjective, and the presence of complements. Within this complex environment, the
short form has been increasingly supplanted by the long form. However, there is a
group of approximately 20 adjectives which favour the short form in the predicate
position and, in some instances, appear to be becoming specialized as predicate
adjectives. This suggests that the class itself is splitting (Corbett 2004), and that
the number of adjectives allowing the short form is likely continue to decline over
time.