3.14 · Practice ready
Predicate Choice and Adjective Government
0 of 10 lessons complete
0%
3.14 · Active
Predicate Choice and Adjective Government
Long, short, nominative, instrumental, complements, and secondary predication
Long, short, nominative, instrumental, complements, and secondary predication
Before you start
- Prerequisites
- Module 3.13
- Estimated time
- 45 minutes
- Lesson steps
- 10
Deliberately not taught here
- Boundary: Russian predicate variants overlap and carry lexical, information-structural, stylistic, and semantic effects. This module teaches robust defaults and diagnostics, not invented absolute rules.
Small steps
What you will learn
- Three syntactic jobs Before choosing a form, determine whether the adjective modifies a noun, forms the main predicate, or adds a secondary state to an event participant.
- Present-tense predicates With zero copula, both short and long nominative predicates occur, but they are not freely interchangeable.
- Past and future: short, nominative, or instrumental An overt copula expands the options, especially for long predicates.
- The permanent-temporary myth Short does not equal temporary, and long does not equal permanent.
- Lexically privileged short predicates Some meanings are conventionally expressed by short forms whose related long adjectives differ in meaning or distribution.
- Adjectives have valency Like verbs, many adjectives license participants or standards in particular cases.
- Prepositional complement frames Many adjective meanings specify a preposition plus case rather than a bare case.
- Infinitives and clauses as complements A predicate adjective may license an infinitive or a clause instead of a noun phrase.
- Secondary predicates A secondary predicate describes a participant during, after, or as a result of the main event.
- Predicate and government assessment Choose syntactic job first, then form, copular case, and complement frame.
Mastery
Ready means you can...
- distinguish attributive, primary-predicate, and secondary-predicate adjectives
- choose among long nominative, short, and long instrumental predicates by construction and meaning
- learn adjective complement frames as lexical valency
- avoid the false equation short = temporary and long = permanent