For Whom Is It Beautiful? In Search of the Subject of Aesthetic Evaluation

This paper concentrates on the issue of expression of dative subject of aesthetic evaluation adverbs on the example of the adverb красиво (beautifully). Despite the seemingly close connection of aesthetic evaluation and the concept of standard, the importance of personal preferences and the subjectivity of the “sense of beauty” cannot be ignored. The corpus data shows that in Russian there is an ongoing transition to a greater emphasis on this subjectivity, which is illustrated, for example, by a gradual spread of “PRONdat + красиво” construction, where dative pronoun stands for the evaluation subject.