Word Formation Types of Relational Adjectives in Russian and Polish: a Comparative Study

This work is devoted to the analysis of derivational types of relative adjectives in Polish and Russian in comparison with each other. The purpose of this study was to examine how the distribution of the suffixes of relative adjectives in the Polish and Russian languages is arranged. To achieve this goal, a database of derivational links (the amount of which is about 260 thousand words) was used. A program was written that was used to automatically mark the database. The program has made pairs of words ("derived word" - "producing word"). It has left only those words that ended the same way as adjectives in Polish end. All words beginning with a capital letter were removed, as well as words formed by the adding a prefix (in such cases the first three letters of the derived and producing words were compared and if they did not match up, the word has not been added to the list). To understand the correlation between derivational types of relative adjectives the corpus analysis method was used. Polish and Russian most productive suffixes, such as -ow-, -sk-, -n- and -ов-, -ск-, -н-, respectively, were compared to each other. Based on the analysis from the point of view of learning complexity, it was concluded that the system of relative adjectives in Russian is more complex than the system of Polish. While in Polish the suffix -ow- is truly the most common and productive, in Russian this role is played by the suffix -n-. The suffix -n- and its various morphs also entail different morphological alternations, which complicates their assimilation for native speakers of Polish. In addition, three onomasiological groups (“Animals”, “Fruits”, “Vegetables”) were analyzed in order to find out which suffixes are the most productive in these groups. The obtained information can be used to teach Russian as a foreign language to Polish speakers.