Contrary to a commonplace claim of the Romanian grammatical research, this paper argues that the elements un, o (a/one) cannot be analysed as a numeral. The reasons are the following. Within the diagnostic contexts of numerals – un / o can be substituted with the negative determiner nici un / nici o (no), or by other indefinite determiners, which are not currently considered numerals at all. On the other hand, cardinal numerals (but not also un / o) only occur in plural contexts. Thus, items un / o do not clearly evince the syntactic behaviour displayed by numerals. On the basis of all these pieces of evidence we conclude that un / o are the inflectional instances of the indefinite determiner.
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