I «piccoli» numerali : osservazioni su norma e uso

Russian numerals as a whole show a very complex morphosyntax: in particular, paucal numerals - a class which includes dva/dve “two”, oba/obe “both”, tri “three”, četyre “four” and some fractional quantities such as pol “half” and poltora/poltory “one and a half” - seem to totally lack rationality and logic in their morphosyntactic characteristics, showing, on top of that, a semantic and syntactic highly idiosyncratic behaviour (Peškovskij 1956; Neidle 1988; Pesetsky 2010). This paper investigates the nature of the constructions with paucals (QP= [Qpauc. [Adj [N]]]) in light of linguistic variations: in other words, on the basis of data drawn from the Russian National Corpus an attempt is made to understand whether the morphosyntax of these structures shows signs of variability, and whether a distinctive trend can be identified. The paper focuses on those cases in which the quantifier phrase is Nominative or inanimate Accusative, so that the paucal numeral is considered to be the head of the QP and the NP will be consequently dependent on it and marked with Genitive case. A statistical study of the data shows interesting trends: the Genitive plural of the adjective is less frequent than previous data in existing literature showed (Worth 1959, Suprun 1959, Corbett 1993), with the exception of the numeral dva, probably due to its stronger grammaticalization. This fact is particularly evident in the QP with oba, whereas with tri and četyre, even if the decrease of this case with masculine and neuter nouns is less evident, there a noticeable increase of Nominative plural: in this way the QP is slowly turning into a NP, in which the adjective and the noun agree within a standard noun phrase. Such a trend can also be interpreted as a move towards a simplification of the QP and a reduction of the semantic idiosincracy which characterizes it.