QUANTIFYING STRUCTURES AND THE MORPHOLOGICAL CLASS OF THE NUMERAL

Abstract

The numeral has always been a long debated subject in the Romanian grammar, due to its heterogeneous nature. The debate is closely connected to the grammarians’ generally stated idea that this lexical-grammatical class is denied the status of part of speech, being included in other grammatical classes. The present study is a bold attempt to demonstrate that the semantic and morpho-syntactic features categorize the numeral as an independent lexical-grammatical class, even though a series of elements interacts with other parts of speech. The values of the various types of numerals explain the morpho-syntactic heterogeneity of this class. Nevertheless, these values attributed to numerals must not be intermingled with the parts of speech themselves.

Keywords

• heterogeneous
• morpho-syntactic features
• part of speech
• numeral.