Resumen de Trapped between case and number. A typology of adnumerative forms

Kristian Roncero

• 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