How and why is ONE different?

Abstract This paper argues that the word for ONE in Russian and Dutch is not a cardinal numeral but a classifier with an unvalued [Unit:_] feature. The value of this feature, e.g., [person], [gender], [place] is provided by the syntactic environment of ONE. Cardinal numerals ≥ TWO are phrasal quantifiers with a specific value for the feature [Partitioning:_]. We propose a novel structure for numeral containing nominal phrases, representing two types of classifiers, generally corresponding to count (lower classifier) and amount (higher classifier). In non-oblique environments the relation between the numeral (except for ONE) and the noun is established by a (silent) P. We show that this structure neatly captures the distinct distribution of ONE, Cardinals, and Indefinite Numerals (like veel ‘many’) with respect to the case assignment patterns and the availability of functional classifier-like nouns (Russian), as well as their cooccurrence with prepositions or diminutive morphology (Dutch).