Title: The Cardinal/Collective Alternation in Russian Numerals

Abstract: In Russian, simple numerals are expressed with two morphological forms: “cardinal” numerals (e.g. pjat’ ‘five’) and “collective” numerals (e.g. pjatero ‘five individuals/a group of five individuals) (cf. Vinogradov 1960, Mel’čuk 1985). The term “collective” reflects the common assumption that such numerals are used to refer to a certain number of entities as a totality/group (Vinogradov 1960, Mel’čuk 1985). It has been observed that NPs headed by collective numerals (e.g. pjatero studentov ‘five students’) often favor collective readings whereas their cardinal counterparts (e.g. pjat’ studentov‘five students’) may be interpreted either distributively or collectively (Mel’čuk 1985). In this talk I take a closer look at the distributional and interpretational properties of cardinal and collective numerals and show that the two forms indeed have a different semantics. However, I argue that the distributive/collective interpretational contrast does not directly reflect this. I shall make the following claims: (i) Cardinal numerals are best analyzed as property expressions (Rothstein 2013, in press) used either as predicate modifiers which assign cardinal properties to pluralities (Landman 2003, 2004) or as arguments which make reference to numbers; (ii) Collective numerals are not restricted to a collective interpretation and have properties of plural count predicates. Therefore they cannot be analyzed as standard collective predicates in the sense of Landman (1989, 1995, 2004); (iii) Collective numeral NPs have properties of numeral classifier NPs and, therefore, collective numerals are best analyzed as semantically complex predicates involving a concealed count classifier.