Short Adjectives in Russian: Features of a Linguodidactic Description

The adjective in the predicate can be represented in full or short form, and, as the practice of teaching Russian shows, foreigners master this fragment of Russian grammar very hard, often generating erroneous statements. The present work is devoted to the analysis of factors determining the choice between the short and full forms of the adjectives of the Russian language in a predicative position. The paper presents a review of theoretical works and manuals of Russian as foreign language, which highlights the topic of short adjectives in the Russian language, with a description of morphological, semantic and syntactic restrictions on the formation of this form. The factors that contribute to the choice of short form in the position of the predicate, and one way or another were mentioned in the literature, are correlated with the information presented by the manuals, which will help to choose / combine materials for studying this difficult topic. The corpus research method made it possible to find out the ratio of occurrences of short form to full form of the most frequency adjectives from the active reserve of the lexical minimum of B2, that is, the tendency of one or another adjective to implement short form in a predicative position. The resulting coefficient conditionally divided all the adjectives into groups, in this paper we examined in more detail the adjectives нужный, страшный, новый - with high, medium and low coefficients, respectively. Working with the corpus of the Russian language allowed us to single out several factors that were not previously discussed in the literature and were potentially important when choosing a form: this is the presence of an adjective denial associated with the value of the attribute’s reason, the semantics of the characterized object, and, above all, the presence of a number of homogeneous predicates. The presence of homogeneous members in the predicative position is a factor determining the choice of the full form, and the higher the adjective coefficient, the stronger this factor for him. Among other things, adjectives describing a person were considered from the categories of condition and state in the framework of the hypothesis that one group more often than another implement short form in a predicative position. The analysis of cases of erroneous use of short and full forms by foreigners showed that, firstly, two main criteria - the temporality / constancy of the sign and the presence of addicts - are not always decisive in the situation of choice, and, relying only on them, the student is likely to make a mistake in the use of form, and, secondly, factors affecting the choice of form are arguing among themselves. The main prospect of studying is the analysis of interacting factors of the opposite direction interacting within the same context and establishing a hierarchy of factors determining the choice of one form or another in a predicative position. The work is distinguished by scientific novelty, theoretical and practical significance, and some observations will be interesting and useful not only to teachers of the Russian language, but also to foreign students and everyone interested in the topic.