Russian deverbal adjectives as relativization devices

In Russian, there are two different types of adjectival deverbal forms. Participles are regular inflectional forms of verbs normally participating in relativization. Normally participles can relativize either subjects or direct objects. In contrast, deverbal adjectives are very specific yet not marginal and quite frequent entities formed by means of derivational affixes. Most of their properties are still understudied, which issue is partially covered by the present paper. The focus is made on syntactic properties of deverbal adjectives. It was observed that they are able to relativize complements. However, deverbal adjectives can relativize noun phrases in different cases having different semantic roles. Moreover, deverbal adjectives can relativize concepts which are not explicit in the underlying verbal proposition. The paper presents data from Russian collected through a corpus-driven study and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The conclusions drawn from the results can be fruitful not only for discussions about Russian derivation and Russian syntax, but also for cross-linguistic studies of participles, deverbal adjectives and relative clauses.