Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Russian, Polish, and Bulgarian, taken as representatives of the three subgroups of Slavic languages (Eastern, Western, and Southern respectively), share the use of the numeral ‘one’ to express indefiniteness (despite their individual differences). The talk is going to address a couple of issues related to the use of this item: (i) the grammaticalization that leads ‘one’ form being a numeral to becoming an indefinite marker, and (ii) the debated semantic import of this element when used to mark indefiniteness. Concerning (i), I will propose a syntax-based path for the grammaticalization process of ‘one’. As for (ii), I will show the challenges of empirically investigating the semantics of ‘one’ as an indefinite determiner in the languages at issue.