Abstract
In this paper, I study the nature of adnumerative or numerative forms; i.e. morphologically dedicated inflectional forms that can only be used with numerals or quantifiers (e.g. Russian dva časá ‘two o'clock’ vs. [gen sg] čása). Adnumeratives are cross‐linguistically very rare; yet they raise some interesting theoretical discussions. This work is based on the framework of Canonical Typology, which assumes the existence of a handful of discrete and cross‐linguistically recurrent morphosyntactic features. Nevertheless, adnumerative forms present a challenge to that distribution, because, as I argue, adnumeratives lie between case and number values. This might well represent a theoretically undesirable scenario, and thus, be diachronically unstable. However, the data I have gathered prove that there are adnumerative forms that have survived in this penumbra for centuries and one can also adduce more evidence of diachronically stable cross‐linguistic phenomena between two feature values (e.g. the anterior). Therefore, I propose that this theoretical space may not be as dark previously depicted and I ask questions for further exploration.
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