A Multifactorial Corpus Analysis of Adjective Order in Russian

The work deals with the multiple prenominal adjectives ordering within a DP/NP in Russian. The aim is to examine the claim concerning word order hierarchy for adjectives suggested in [Cinque 1994] via quantitative analysis of corpus data from the Russian National Corpus (RNC). We use the RNC semantic annotation taxonomy for the semantic class of an adjective. We checked the pairwise orders for different semantic classes (e.g. possessive > colour vs. colour > possessive). Our data confirm the claim (suggested in the experimental studies) that the possessive adjectives should be divided into two classes: referential and generic. There is one case of significant hierarchy violation. The referential possessive adjectives occupy the intermediate position between gradable adjectives (namely, after ‘colour’) and ungradable ones (‘nationality’ class). Hence, the determiner-like possessives occupy not the left-most position as in languages with articles. These findings serve the additional evidence in favor of theoretical claim that determiner-like adjectives in articleless languages acquire determiner function only in the left-most position, otherwise they function as other adjectives. The corpus data confirm the claim that the change of the adjective structural position induces its semantic type coercion. The detection of expected word-order violations can be helpful in word sense disambiguation and for error detection in RNC semantic annotation.