Compound Lexemes Consisting of a Noun and a Numeral: The Case of година-две ‘a year or two’, лев-два ‘a lev or two’

This paper addresses two main questions: 1) Are expressions such as година-две (‘a year or two’), лев-два (‘a lev or two’), час-два (‘an hour or two’), месец-два (‘a month or two’), etc., lexemes or expressions; 2) If considered lexemes, what grammatical class should they belong to? The study first outlines the nouns that can serve as the first component in these forms and reviews the existing linguistic literature. The research suggests that they should be considered lexemes, emphasising the need to differentiate them from the corresponding expressions. Furthermore, based on their syntactic proper-ties, as examined through corpus data, and in line with normative Bulgarian grammar, the paper argues that these forms should be classified as numerals. Attention is given to fluctuations in number agreement, e.g. ден-два мина/минаха (‘a day or two has passed / have passed’) and следващата/следващите седмица-две (‘the next week or two’). The primary reason for categorising such forms as numerals is that their second component is a numeral (два/две ‘two’) and that they require specific number forms for the noun they modify. Lastly, the paper briefly compares the Bulgarian ден-два ‘a day or two’, лев-два ‘a lev or two’ with their counterparts in Czech and Russian, where similar number agreement fluctuations are also observed.