"I am unhappy, but alive": The adjectival predicate for the pronoun "I"

Abstract

The article describes the formation of the construction “I + adjectival predicate” and its existence in the Russian language for three hundred years. A person’s ideas about one’s Self are manifested in the choice of adjectives, the composition of which is updated. The need to characterize oneself is considered in the article in connection with the data of diachronic psychology on the growth of the individual’s social independence and the increase in the value of the “I” in the 18th and 19th centuries. The “top” list of adjectives (unhappy, alive, stupid, good, kind, young, evil, alien, old, poor) was formed by the beginning of the 20th century and has survived to the present day. Observations on the general chronology of the appearance of new components within the framework of the construction allowed establishing that until the mid-1820s the construction “I + adjectival predicate” was rare, and the adjective was usually a definition with a predicate noun, but not an independent predicate. Now the adjective began to characterize a person regardless of one’s type of activity or social role. The total use of the construction has been growing since the 1850s. Adjectives- predicates usually represent a characteristic of a person according to various parameters: moral self-esteem, character traits, intelligence, health status or physical data, features of self-perception. A positive evaluation in the predicate is less common than a negative one. In the first half of the 20th century, personality characteristics related to the socio-political situation are increasingly appearing in the structure of the construction) and testifying to the exit of the perception of the Self into the philosophical sphere. The second half of the 20th century is characterized by the active exploitation of cliched means of autocharacteristics formed in the previous period; the growing popularity of tautologies and repetitions, the spread of the predicate by specifying the manifestations of the declared quality or explaining possible cause-and-effect relationships, detailing negative / positive characteristics; the growth of the use of adjectives denoting characteristics understandable to a narrow circle of people or ambivalent characteristics, as well as qualities condemned by public opinion. Changes in the usual discursive practices caused by political and economic upheavals lead to an increase in the individual’s need for self-identification and self-presentation, which is reflected in the described constructions.