ADJ: adjective
Definition
Adjectives are words that typically modify nouns and specify their properties or attributes. They may also function as predicates, as in
Машина зеленая “The car is green.”
The ADJ tag is intended for ordinary adjectives only. See DET
for determiners and NUM for cardinal numerals.
In accord with the UD approach, adjectival ordinal numerals (первый, седьмой, стопятидесятый) are tagged as adjectives, although the traditional grammar classifies them as numerals. They behave like adjectives both morphologically and syntactically, with the exception that they cannot be compared and negated.
Most Russian adjectives inflect for ru-feat/Gender (большой – большое – большая) “big”, ru-feat/Number (большой – большие), ru-feat/Case (большой – большого – большому – большим – большом), ru-feat/Degree (большой – больше – наибольший) and Negation (большой – небольшой).
Examples
- большой “big”
- старый “old”
- зеленый “green”
- студенческий, учительский “student’s, teacher’s” (possessive adjectives)
- первый, второй, третий “first, second, third”
- сделанный “done” (passive participial adjective)
- делающий “doing” (present participial adjective, derived from present transgressive)
- сделавший “having done” (past participial adjective, derived from past transgressive)
Border cases
Passive participles lie on the border between verbs and adjectives.
Core participial forms (ending in consonant or short vowel) are tagged VERB.
Long forms are participial adjectives and they are tagged ADJ.
For example:
- Verb: писан, писано, писана, писаны “written”
- Adjective: писанный, писанное, писанная, писанные “written”
Only true participles (verbs) can be used to form the passive voice (but it may be sometimes difficult to distinguish from copula constructions, see AUX). On the other hand, the participial adjectives inflect for case and thus can modify nouns.
There is an analogy with some adjectives that preserved so called nominal (short) forms. And these adjectives are not derived from verbs. Example:
- Short (nominal) forms: стар, старо, стара “old”
- Normal (pronominal) forms: старый, старое, старая “old”
Here both groups are ADJ. The nominal forms are used in predication,
the standard forms both in predication and to modify nouns.
ADJ in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [ca] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [et] [eu] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [vi] [xcl] [yue] [zh]