The Use of Ordinal Numerals in Various Semantic Contexts (Based on Parallel Translations of the New Testament)

This study compares the use of ordinal constructions in different semantic contexts across five languages: Russian, English, Spanish, Indonesian, and Rutul. The analysis is based on parallel translations of the New Testament. The data include verses containing at least one ordinal numeral in any of the sampled languages, taken from six books of the New Testament (the canonical Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelation). Special attention is paid to contexts in which ordinal numerals are not consistently rendered across all languages. Semantic contexts are defined according to the semantic class of the nouns modified by the ordinal numerals. The analysis covers four classes of nouns: animate beings, inanimate objects, temporal intervals, and events, as well as the construction “the X-th time.” The initial hypothesis posited that the frequency of ordinal numerals in different contexts would correlate with the animacy hierarchy. This hypothesis was not supported by the data: in all languages examined, ordinal constructions were used less frequently with nouns denoting animate beings than with those denoting inanimate objects or events. Furthermore, the study shows that ordinal constructions are more commonly used for non-extreme elements of a set than for its first or last members. The article also describes non-ordinal constructions found in the data, which employ other types of numerals (most often cardinals) or alternative linguistic means.

ordinal numerals, parallel corpus, semantics