Evolution of Number Names in Modern Russian

The paper deals with the evolution of morphological forms and syntactic relations of numerals which give names to categories of numbers. The ways of formation of a number name тысяча / tysjatscha and its part-of-speech signs are illustrated with the texts taken from the Russian National Corpus. It's the first systematic description of transition of a noun into a number name regarded as a complex grammatical process – morphological unification of case forms (instrumental case тысячью / tysjatschju); substitution of countable noun government by coordination with it in every indirect case; loss of syntactic forms of gender and number (i.e. their ability to correlate with words in gender and number); loss of morphological forms of the plural number and their substitution by forms of the singular number; formation of compound numerals on the bases of the numeral тысяча / tysjatscha; signs of morphological separation of the number name тысяча / tysjatscha and the name of quantity. The development and grammatical adaptation of тысяча / tysjatscha in the line of numerals is reported to have taken long. The article presents a sequence of obtaining new features of the numerals. Evolution of numerals is presented as a relevant grammatical process that implements synthetic potential of the Russian language grammatical system.