216 Greville G. Corbett
is masculine and neuter, while dve is feminine). Tri 'three' and cetyre 'four' show no
agreement in gender, but like all the lower numerals they show agreement in the
sub-gender of animacy. Pjat' 'five' and similar numerals inflect like a particular in-
flectional class of nouns, in the singular only. However, in the oblique cases such
numerals fail to govern the genitive, as would be expected with a noun, but instead
they agree in case. And so on up the scale. These morphosyntactic properties of
the simple cardinal numerals are summarized in (27) (for examples and details of
the tests see Corbett 1978).
(27) The simple cardinal numerals of Russian
odin dva tri pjat' sto tysjaca million
i 235 100 1,000 1,000,000- agrees with noun in-
syntactic number - agrees in case in the
direct case - agrees in gender
- agrees in animacy
- has no semanticall
independent plural - fails to take agreeing
determiners - does not take noun
in genitive plural
throughout paradigm
Each numeral in turn shows slightly fewer adjective-like (more noun-like) proper-
ties. It is obvious, but none the less significant, that they are arranged in numerical
order. This is a good illustration of the universal 'if the simple cardinal numerals
of a given language vary in their syntactic behaviour, the numerals showing nou-
nier behaviour will denote higher numerals than those with less nouny behaviour'
(Corbett 1978: 363; cf. Hurford 1987:187-97).
10.14. POSSESSIONIn Slavonic languages, to different degrees, possession may be expressed by a de-
rived adjective, typically when the referent is human, singular, and specific. In
Modern Russian, use of the genitive case is more common than use of the posses-
sive adjective. However, the possessive adjective is often used in speech, when de-
rived from kinship terms, given names, short forms of names (like Sasa for Alek-
sandr), and diminutives of these; for details and sources see Corbett (1987). Two
suffixes are used to form possessive adjectives: -in-, which survives better, and -ov-.