The Grammaticalization of ‘One’ in Slavic at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

This paper investigates the grammaticalization of the numeral ‘one’ in Slavic languages at the syntax-semantics interface. While extensively documented in Romance and Germanic, Slavic has received limited attention despite exhibiting varying grammaticalization degrees. We propose a unified analysis combining three theoretical frameworks: a semantic account based on bleaching, capturing the progressive loss of cardinality and the shift from referentiality to non-referentiality; a syntactic analysis tracing the movement of ‘one’ from NumP to SpecDP and D, correlating with the interpretive stages in semantics; and a nanosyntactic representation that explains how a single form functions across these positions through containment relations. This unified approach reconciles the formal identity of ‘one’ across its uses with its changing semantic and syntactic properties, contributing to grammaticalization theory and cross-linguistic typology of indefinite marking.