ON THE EXPANSION OF THE ACCUSATIVE IN QUANTITATIVE EXPRESSIONS

 This paper studies non-canonical use of the аccusative in quantitative contexts, where other case forms with and without prepositions are normally used. Such use is characteristic of a fairly wide range of nouns with quantitative meaning: tysyacha and tyshcha(tyshchonka) ‘one thousand’, sotnya, sotochka, sotka ‘one hundred’, dyuzhina ‘one dozen’,para and parochka ‘couple’, uyma, prorva, t'ma ‘a lot’, polovina ‘half’, tonna ‘ton’, andminuta ‘minute’ (we mention a-declination nouns owing to the fact that their nominative and accusative forms do not coincide). An example is the sentence «Priyekhalo paru chelovek» ‘A couple (acc.) of people arrived’. We hope to reveal a mechanism explaining the behavior of the accusative in all such cases. We assume that poor semantic loading of case oppositions in quantitative expressions leads to the reduction of this oppositions to two or three cases. The accusative competes with the genitive and nominative. As far as quantitative contexts are concerned, the accusative wins more often than not, because it is typical of non-agentive uses. It seems that one can observe an intensification of this trend; however, it is difficult to firmly establish whether this is the case, since this phenomenon is very conversational and we have reliable material only for the current state (documented oral speech, blogs). It is clear, however, that the tendency itself is not new, yet one might say that the system of case oppositions for quantitative words has never fully developed.