NUM: numeral
Definition
A numeral is a word, functioning most typically as a determiner, adjective or pronoun, that expresses a number and a relation to the number, such as quantity, sequence, frequency or fraction.
Note that cardinal numerals are covered by NUM whether they are used as determiners or not (as in Windows 7) and whether they are expressed as words (չորս), digits (4), Roman numerals (IV), or Armenian letters (Դ). Other words functioning as determiners (including pronominal quantifiers: interrogative and relative (քանի “how many”); demonstrative (այսքան “this many”); indefinite (մի քանի “several”); definite (բոլոր, ողջ “all, whole”) are tagged DET.
Note that some words that may be traditionally called numerals, are not tagged NUM, based on their syntactic and morphological behavior.
Note that there are no adverbial ordinal and multiplicative numerals in Armenian.
If the numerals inflect as nouns, they are tagged NOUN.
Examples
- 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2014, 1000000, 3.14159265359
- I, II, III, IV, V, MMXIV
- մեկ, երկու, երեք, չորս, հինգ, յոթանասուն “one, two, three, four, five, seventy”
- Ա, Ժ, Է, ԺԱ, Ն, Ռ “1, 10, 7, 11, 400, 1000”
- կես, քառորդ “one-half, quarter”: denominators of fractions constitute a separate class of cardinal numerals.
Counterexamples
- առաջին, երկրորդ, երրորդ “first, second, third”: adjectival ordinal numerals. They are tagged ADJ, and the NumType feature reveals their semantic relation to numbers.
- մեկ-մեկ, երկու-երկու, երեք-երեք “one at a time, two at a time, three at a time”: adverbial distibutive numerals. They are tagged ADV, and the NumType feature reveals their semantic relation to numbers.
- մեկ, երկուս, երեք, չորս, հինգ “number one, number two, number three, number four, number five”: names of numbers, or of objects identified by the number (e.g. of a bus route). They are not considered numerals and they are tagged NOUN.
Border cases
- երիցս, չորիցս, բազմիցս, եռապատիկ, քառապատիկ, բազմապատիկ, եռակի, քառակի, բազմակի “thrice, four-time(s), many-time(s)”: n-tuples (n-tice) are not considered numerals in the Armenian grammar. They are tagged either ADJ or ADV.
- տասնյակ, հարյուրյակ, հնգանոց, իննոց, 20-ական, 30-ական (թվականներին) “a ten, a hundred, five-note, nine-note, by twenty, thirthies” are not considered numerals in the Armenian grammar. They are tagged either ADJ or NOUN.
- հարյուրավոր, հազարավոր, միլիոնավոր, միլիարդավոր “hundreds of, thousands of, millions of, billions of”: expressions -s of, for instance, in phrases like հազարավոր մարդիկ էին դուրս եկել փողոց “thousands of people went on the streets” are adjectives and tagged ADJ.
- հարյուր, հազար “hundred, thousand”: words for large quantities are ambiguous between cardinal numerals (tagged
NUM) and nouns. If they inflect as nouns, they are tagged NOUN; but the borderline is fuzzy. For instance, in phrases like հազար ասացի “I told thousand times”, հազար մարդ “thousand (many different) people”, հազար is a noun. In numeric expressions, e.g. 110 հազար դոլար (“110 thousand dollars”), it is a cardinal numeral (see specific syntax).
NUM in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [ess] [et] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [yue] [zh]