How can one figure out if there is an implicit noun for a noun that declines like an adjective, and if so, what it is?

Question

Certain nouns that decline like adjectives are adjectival nouns where it is standard to suppress the noun, e.g. ванная is short for ванная комната, and it is not too hard to guess what the implicit noun is (if, say, one is an English speaker). On the other hand, in this question KCd asked what implicit noun запятая modifies, and the answer seems to be, in modern Russian, nothing. Today I came across the word набережная and I am wondering the same question about it: is there an implicit noun that it modifies, and if so, what is it?

It seems that a difference between ванная and запятая or набережная is that ванная can be used as an adjective, whereas запятая or набережная can only be used as nouns. Is it the case that nouns that decline like adjectives but cannot be used as adjectives simply have no implicit noun in modern Russian? If this is not the case, what way is there to figure out what the implicit noun is? (And also for adjectival nouns in general.)

It is also suggested in a reply to the same question of KCd that запятая is closer to an adverb than to an adjective. It feels to me (from the point of view of an absolute novice) that the same is the case for набережная—might it be the case that nouns that decline like adjectives but are closer to adverbs than adjectives do not have implicit nouns (if, indeed, they do not) because there was nothing for them to modify historically?

One other thing I do not understand is that this morphological analysis tool only gives plural declensions for запятая or набережная: what happened to the singular declensions?

Answer 1

It's not clear to me why would you need to find this implicit noun, but looks like the most reliable source here is the history of the word usage. Currently the most convenient one is Russian National Corpus. Explanatory dictionary can also give a hint, but this is not as reliable as the historic documents.

As the time goes by and nobody uses the "implicit noun" anymore, the word itself may change and the original noun that accompanied it may no longer go well with this "new noun".

For instance, in some cities people use "парадная" or "парадное" as a synonym for "подъезд". Explanatory dictionary defines it as "парадный вход":

пара́дное ср. разг.; = пара́дная
Парадный вход. Толковый словарь Ефремовой. Т. Ф. Ефремова. 2000.

But why "вход" is "парадная/парадное"? The possible implicit nouns are "парадная лестница" and "парадное крыльцо". But is it so?

Another option here is that "парадная" is created to line up with other parts of the house: прихожая, передняя, гостиная, детская, людская etc. And here we have another idea - that the nouns that were created from adjectives may create a new template for the words that describe areas inside the building. For instance - бойлерная, прачечная, электрощитовая, серверная, переговорная, игровая, etc. While "переговорная" or "серверная" may imply "комната", but бойлерная and прачечная now usually are separate buildings.

As for the words that may be used with or without their nouns - usually they are accompanied with nouns in the official language, but used separately in colloquial speech: справочная vs справочная служба, окружная vs окружная дорога, etc.

As for your examples - запятая is in fact borrowed from Church Slavonic, so it is always been a noun in Russian, and as such bears no "implied noun" at all.

Ванная can still be used as "ванная комната" (see National Corpus). There is also душевая by the way, but душевая комната is much rarer than ванная комната.

As for набережная - we can found traces of its usage as "набережная улица" in National Corpus, but in fact it is used only separately after 1800, so many people does not associate набережная with улица any more:

"Каменная Набережная Линия", "Набережная Николская Улица", "Кикины Полаты Набережные" [А. И. Богданов. Описание Санктпетербурга (1751)].

"Мы въехали в набережную улицу ― и я вспомнил берег Невы. [Н. М. Карамзин. Письма русского путешественника (1793)]".

Answer 2

A linguist might answer this better. I hope, I got this right. I am answering from pure language feeling, as a native speaker.

What I cannot help but observe myself is that those "adjectively" looking nouns originate from describing the situations, where the noun is partially lost already, but can be reconstructed in the hindsight.

• улица Подвальная (in older cities): modern speaker might understand this as "cellar street", but it's actually под вальная, it was a street following the city walls.
• ванная vs. ванная комната
• столовая – same issue
• набережная — similar to подвальная, на берегу
• парадная (oh hello St. Petersburg, old friend), парадная лестница, as mentioned above.

Ellipsis is quite strong in Russian, why say the original noun if it's clear anyway?