Analytical adjectives in the modern Russian: systemic-functional features

Abstract

The article identifies and describes the analytical adjectives in the modern Russian and their structural and functional features (grammatical, spelling, positional, functional-semantic). Methods of continuous sampling, observation, description, analogy, classification and quantitative were implemented in the course of the study. Data of the National Corpus of the Russian Language (newspaper, main corpus and social media corpus) as well as data of Yandex.ru search engine provided the main language material of the research. The article represents a brief review of scientific research on analytic adjectives, outlines the range of problems related to them, including their narrow and broad understanding. The conducted research specified the grammatical features of analytical adjectives that enables to define their boundaries. The findings indicate that analytical adjectives are a special class (unchangeable or unchangeable in combination with a concrete noun) actively formed and functioning, characterized by the semantics of attribute, the ability to specify a noun and express the grammatical meanings of gender, number and case by means of the defined noun ending; position and spelling are not constitutive features that influence the identification of analytical adjectives. The results of comparing the function of analytical adjectives’ peculiarities in different texts and the norms established by dictionaries using quantitative methods, determined the main tendencies in their spelling, in particular, the prevalence of hyphenated and separate spelling with nouns. The research also revealed positional peculiarities of functioning in relation to the nouns they define (the prevalence of their prepositional use as well as the possibility of postpositional use in relation to nouns). The study determines the main spheres of analytical adjectives functioning. The analyses of the data allows the general estimating of the dynamics of analytical adjectives development in the modern Russian language and suggesting the future prospects of this ambiguous and heterogeneous class of words in the Russian language.

Keywords

• analytical adjectives
• tendency to analytism
• grammatical features
• grammatical status
• centaur-words
• spelling peculiarities
• positional peculiarities
• scope of use