Pseudo-Numbers in Tarist

In Tarist, numbers and certain determiners form a closed class. Unlike in some languages, these differ significantly from adjectives.

The word order in the Tarist noun phrase is very much like in English, except adpositional attributes precede the head in adjectivified forms, subclauses often are replaced by participles, and adverbial attributes do not as such exist - adjectives are formed from adverbials instead. Unlike English, adpositional phrases can be either pre- or postpositional – this depends on the lexical properties of the adposition itself, as well as on syntactical factors - arguments are more likely to have prepositions than adjuncts are, for instance.

Given the above information, we can go on to this form:

[prep] [det] [numP] [adjP]* [noun] [relP]

Out of these, adjP is the only part that can follow a copula:

The X is adjP. It is an adjP X.

*The X are numP. They are numP X.
*The X is relP. They are X relP.

Normally, adjectives that are derived from adverbials and prepositional phrases lose their derivation when being extracted. Numeral phrases behave slightly differently - the subject will be in a quirky case, and the ~copula will be 'have' instead.

Numerals, unlike adjectives, affect the case and number marking of their head nouns: inanimate nouns after a numeral are in the singular. If the numeral is in the nominative, ergative or absolutive, the noun will be in the ablative (if neuter), or the ergative plural (if animate). (The obvious exception to this are numbers whose value is one or a non-integer or zero. Ones always are followed by the singular of the same case, rationals and zero by the ablative singular.)

Now for the lexical quirk - some words whose meaning we would consider more adjective-like are syntactically numerals in Tarist. This leads to some peculiarities. Examples:

bari - young
tars - old
knaedze - big, huge
xvurn - valuable, important
sogor - dead
xkuna - whole
muras - strong
sitvi - small

A peculiarity with these is that they can be part of big numerals. They can be inserted anywhere in a numeral construction, giving numbers like 'onehundredwholeteen', 'strongthousandfiftythree', etc. These adjectives too affect the case marking and the number marking of their heads (although for animates, they permit singular and plural marking - with inanimates, there are workarounds using other quantifiers in coordinated constructions).