Grammatika prilagatel′nogo: Tipologija ad′′jektivnosti i atributivnosti by P. V. Graščenkov (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Grammatika prilagatel′nogo: Tipologija ad′′jektivnosti i atributivnosti by P. V. Graščenkov
• Egor Tsedryk

P. V. Graščenkov. Grammar of the adjective: Typology of adjectivity and attributivity]. Moscow: Izdatel'skij dom JaSK, 2018. 432 pp.

1. Introduction

It seems inconceivable to describe syntactic properties of a given language without reference to parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, and so on). They are inherited from traditional grammars of well-known languages and are usually taken for granted. Nonetheless, one may wonder whether or not they are universal and how languages encode them in their systems. Focusing on the adjective, Graščenkov (hereafter: G) in his book scrutinizes the morphosyntactic properties of this category from a crosslinguistic perspective, with Russian being the most representative (in addition to being the language of the book). As the author points out from the outset, Russian embraces a large "zone of grammatical phenomena typologically related to adjectives" (p. 10).¹ Nevertheless, the reader avid for crosslinguistic data will find a wealth of examples from many other typologically unrelated languages; next to Russian, these are Ossetic, Altaic, and Nakh-Daghestanian languages. Overall, the book covers an impressive array of languages, listed at the end of the book (pp. 427–29), with a total of 73 tokens. It is clear that such a volume of data is impossible to cover without the use of secondary sources, but the author also reports data collected during his own fieldwork, including expeditions dating back to his work under the supervision of Aleksandr Evgenievič Kibrik. In the preface, the author acknowledges Kibrik's influence on his broader typological view of adjectives. He also mentions Ekaterina Anatolievna Lyutikova, who influenced his choice of syntax as a main field of interest. In fact, G's keenness for syntactic analysis emerges through the book (selected structures from chapters 2 and 3 will be presented in sections 2.2 [End Page 329] and 2.3). The book has four chapters, which I will report on sequentially in §2. Starting from chapter 2, the material presented in the book is quite dense (and sometimes it goes beyond the realm of adjectives in their strict understanding). For this reason, I have to limit myself to selected highlights. For expository purposes, I will mostly focus on Russian, with only a couple of examples taken from Altaic and Nakh-Daghestanian languages (see §2.4). In §3 I revisit the extended projections that G proposes for the adjectives in Russian, and I briefly conclude in §4.

2. Summary

2.1. Chapter 1

The book starts with an overview of approaches to parts of speech, presenting both functionalist and generativist perspectives (e.g., Croft 1991; Baker 2003) and incorporating insights from the Russian philological tradition, including works of Peškovskij and Ščerba. Seeking a broad definition of a part of speech, G relies on the concept of markedness, as it is used in typological studies (understood as the presence of formal markers when a lexical category is to fulfill a function). More precisely, he defines a part of speech as "a derivationally unmarked distributional class with a specific set of grammatical categories in a given language" (p. 34). Furthermore, zooming in on the adjectives, he singles out attributivity as a distinctive distributive class. In fact, the key message of this chapter (and of the entire book) is that adjectivity and attributivity should be differentiated on a categorial level. Attributivity is a universal function, encoded in a syntactic head, labeled as A, while adjectivity can be realized as a language-specific adjectival category (prominent in European languages) or it can be part of the verbal category (in languages of Southeast Asia). From the terminological point of view, prilagatel′noe in Russian (commonly translated as "adjective") includes both ad′′jektiv (adjective in its language-specific sense) and atributiv (a more general attributive function). The former forms a subset of the latter, and hence the following implicational generalization holds: the existence of the adjectival category in a language implies the existence of the attributive function, but not vice versa. That is, adjectives are universal to the extent to which A is a universal category.

In some languages, A is manifested...