Grammar of shastje and radost’: changing the government model

About the author:

Olga I. Severskaya, Cand. Sc. (Philology), Leading Researcher, Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
oseverskaya@yandex.ru, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6277-9756

Abstract:

This article examines the process of unconscious archaization of speech, in which a spontaneous return to the “older” language norm is observed. The author provides examples of changes that affected almost all levels of the language system in the 2000s, paying attention to grammatical archaisms. The government models of the short adjectives rad ‘glad’ and schastliv ‘happy’ and their variants deviating from the current literary norm were chosen as the object of study. The research aims to establish whether they are erroneous or, on the contrary, legitimate. The results of the corpus research suggest that the revival of the “older” normative version, which is perceived as an innovation or, in the author’s opinion, a spontaneous recursion of the norm. The supposed reasons for this process include: intensification of information processes with a simultaneous weakening of attention to the quality of published texts; the influence of current poetic practice of conscious and intuitive archaization of language; English-language influence and translation errors. The conclusion suggests that the constructions under study are legitimately colloquial and can be perceived rather “vintage” than archaic.

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