SEVERAL SPEECH PHENOMENA ASSOCIATED WITH NUMERALS

Abstract

In the reality of communication in Vietnamese, there are still a number of speech phenomena which demonstrate interference between numerals and nouns, and interference among their internal sub-categories. Therefore, in the article, after presenting the concept of numerals and their classification as widely acknowledged, we continue to expand the problem, establish signs to distinguish between cardinal numerals and ordinal numerals. Then, we explicate three speech phenomena associated with numerals, including i) the case of nominalized numerals, such as sign numerals, family names in “serial order”; ii) the case of correlation between subtypes of numerals, like those used to call months of the year, days of the month, days of the week, hours of the day; and iii) pragmatic meanings of numerals in a kind of tautological compound sentences.