Short and Clipped Forms of Adjective in Russian Spiritual Poetry of Karelia: Grammatical Aspect

Abstract

The question of the functioning of short and clipped forms of the adjective in Russian spiritual poetry is considered. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of study of spiritual poetry from the point of view of language and the opportunity to consider the interaction of oral and written traditions, secular and Christian culture, which are closely intertwined in the folklore genre of spiritual poetry. The novelty of the research is seen both in an attempt to solve one of the “eternal questions” of the Russian linguistic tradition, concerning the ratio of adjective forms, and in the material used for study: the texts from the Scientific Archive of the Karelian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Phonogram Archive of the YALI Institute of the Karelian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, collected in XX century on the territory of present-day Karelia and included in the collection “Spiritual Poems of the Russian North”, which had not previously been the object of research in terms of the use of the linguistic units under consideration. It is shown that the analysis of short and clipped forms of adjective functioning in spiritual verses contributes to the identification of the linguistic specificity of the works of this folklore genre. The conclusion is made about the dual nature of spiritual verses, which determines the predominance of clipped attributive forms of the adjective over the actual short forms.

Keywords

• linguistic and folklore studies
• russian spiritual poetry
• short and clipped forms of the adjective
• russian north