ON SOME PROPERTIES OF INDEFINITE-QUANTITATIVE EXPRESSIONS WITH A PRONOUN COMPONENT

The paper discusses grammatical, semantic and communicative features of indefinite-quantitative pronouns malo kto (‘few people’), malo kakoi / chei (‘few’), mnogo kto (‘many people’), mnogo kakoi / chei (‘many’), that are included in a large class of derived malo / mnogo kto (‘few / many people’) are compared with the indefi nite-quantitative expressions malo / mnogo X (‘few / many X’). It is shown that these expressions are not completely synonymous and therefore in many cases are not interchangeable: V etot pozdnii chas v vagone bylo malo lyudei VS. V etot pozdnii chas v vagone malo kto byl ‘At this late hour there were few people in the carriage’.
Within their group, indefi nite-quantitative pronouns are also asymmetrical. NRC statistics shows that there are more expressions with components malo / redko (kto / kakoi / chei) ‘few / rare (who / what / which)’ than with component mnogo (‘many’). These expressions also have grammatical diff erences (which are determined by semantic and communicative diff erences), for example, in the choice of number forms (for mnogo ‘many’ singular numbers are impossible): It’s rare that a book can cause such 100% rejection (possible option: some books) VS. I have visited many places (*many place).