Współczesne losy liczebnika polskiego i rosyjskiego w ujęciu konfrontatywnym

Contemporary Polish and Russian numerals. A contrastive studyNumerals have always been a matter of great interest among linguists, because since pre-Slavic times this lexical category and its inflections have undergone many changes, which has usually meant simplification. Contrastive studies of Polish and Russian numerals have shown that this grammatical category is one of the most difficult categories to acquire and master. Numerals are the only category that has undergone such profound unifications in its declension paradigm. Currently, there are many innovations regarding the grammatical forms of numerals occurring in the language use as well as in descriptive norms. Among these changes, the following are the most significant: the grammatical forms of cardinal numerals have replaced these of ordinal numerals; numeral inflections are gradually disappearing; collective numerals have dropped their inflections. What is more, difficult case inflections are being supplanted by “simple” inflections, and the initial parts of collective numerals are no longer inflected. Another tendency observed is that syntactic placements characteristic for inflected numerals are being replaced by ones characteristic for other “simple” inflections. The abovementioned innovations are present in the synthetic linguistic systems of Polish and Russian to a different extent. The changes exhibit strong analytic tendencies in both languages. These changes manifest themselves predominantly in the lack of inflection in most forms, which is characteristic for analytic languages.