The Variety of Functions of the Numeral and Indefinite Marker 'one' in Bulgarian and Russian

This book investigates the development and the use of the indefinite marker ‘one’ in two Slavic languages, Bulgarian and Russian. The central goal is to explore the evolutionary stage reached by Bulgarian edin ‘one’ and Russian odin ‘one’ in comparison to languages with a fully fledged article system as well as to examine their distributional, semantic and pragmatic properties. Furthermore, this book addresses the variety of related meanings of ‘one’, which usually receive less attention in the literature (e.g. the expression of equality, successivity etc.). Of particular interest is the ability of ‘one’ to convey the restrictive meaning as well as to contribute to an intensifying interpretation of evaluative sentences