Contextually determined or semantically distinct? The competition between instrumental, long form nominative and short form nominative in Russian predicate adjectives

Abstract Based on data from the syntactic subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus, we undertake a quantitative analysis of the competition between Russian predicate adjectives in the instrumental (e.g., pustym ‘empty’), the long form nominative (e.g., pustoj ‘empty’), and the short form nominative (e.g., pust ‘empty’). It is argued that the choice of adjective form is partly determined by the context. Four (nearly) categorical rules are proposed based on the following contextual factors: the form of the copula verb, the presence/absence of a complement, and the nature of the subject of the sentence. At the same time, a “space of competition” is identified, where all three adjective forms are attested. It is hypothesized that within the space of competition, the three forms are recruited to convey different meanings, and it is argued that our analysis lends support to the traditional idea that the short form nominative is closely related to verbs. Our findings are furthermore compatible with the idea that the short form nominative expresses temporary states, rather than inherent permanent characteristics.