Page 39 - 4723

Grammatical categories of numerals

The English numeral as a part of speech is characterized by
the following features:
- such typical stem-building suffixes as –teen, -ty;
- its lexico-grammatical meaning of “number”;
- the category of numerical qualification represented in opposemes
like seven-seventh;
- its unilateral combinability with nouns (three children, the third
child);
- its syntactic function as an attribute, less frequently as some other
part of the sentence.
The lexico-grammatical meaning of “number” is not to be
confused with the grammatical meaning of “number”:
- the former is the generalization of a multitude of lexical meaning
of individual numerals (five, ten, fifty seven, etc.). The latter is the
generalization of only two grammatical meanings: “singular” and
“plural”;
- the plural number, as in boys, shows indefinite plurality, whereas
the meanings of numerals, as in twenty, forty are definite plurality.
English and Ukrainians numerals are similar as to their
lexico-grammatical meanings, ways of stem-building, combinability
and syntactic functions, but they differ greatly regarding their
grammatical categories. Unlike their English counterparts,
Ukrainian numerals possess the categories of gender (третій –
третя – третє), case (три – трьох – трьом), and number
(перший – перші).
There is a great difference between ordinal and cardinal numerals in
Ukrainian as far as their categories are concerned. Ordinal numerals
resemble adjectives not only in having the categories of number,
gender and case, but in the forms of the grammatical morphemes as
well. Compare: третій – мужній, третього – мужнього, etc.
Cardinal numerals do not possess the categories of number and
gender (with the exception of один, два). Therefore, the numeral in

38