Rival Forms of Comparatives in Russian

Abstract

Rival forms, i.e. forms that appear to have the same function, have long been an important issue that many linguists are paying attention to. Rivalry is interesting because it has implications for inter alia variation and language change. Examples of rival forms are morphological doublets like -ness and -ity in English (Szymanek 2005, 441). In this paper I explore the rivalry between comparatives in the predicative position in Russian. My findings lend support to the “cocktail hypothesis” described in Nesset (2016), whereby the choice of one of the rival forms depends on the interplay of diverse factors. As argued in the present study, the most important factors that determine the choice of comparative forms are the length of the adjective, its frequency and the year when the text with the relevant example was published.