NEW COLLOQUIAL COPULAR CONSTRUCTIONS IN RUSSIAN

The article analyzes nonstandard colloquial constructions with a zero copula in Russian, such as Самолет слишком дорого ‘A plane (is) too expensive’. Their first part contains a noun or a noun phrase, while the second includes a form like дорого ‘expensive’, which can be analyzed either as a neuter short form of adjective or a predicative (predicative adverbial). The most stirking is the absence of the pronoun это, obligatory for this type of sentences in literary Russian. Thus, the construction violates the fundamental rule of Russian syntax saying that an NP subject must control agreement of the predicate (verb, adjective, adjectival pronoun, and so on). Although many contexts of our sample can be described in terms of situational nominals (either the subject noun like самолет ‘plane’ has a situational reading or a complement clause is omitted), some examples refer to an object itself, rather than a situation. I show that the occurrence of this construction reflect the fact that the opposition of predicatives vs. short agreeing forms of adjectives becomes not very strict: the corpus data show that in the period from the beginning of 19th until the end of 20th century, the number of copular construction with это increases, and the number of short forms decreases. Masculine, feminine and plural agreement of short adjective forms becomes more rare, and our colloquial constructions logically follow from the general process.