On the trigger for numeralization of Polish higher numerals Katarzyna Miechowicz-Mathiasen & Dominika Dziubała-Szrejbrowska Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań 1 Introduction Polish numeral nouns 5-10 originally belonged to feminine i-stems, a status they inherited from Proto-Slavic. Gradually, they changed their nominal status into a new one – numeral, which developed its own declension and specific morphosyntactic properties. We refer to the process involved in that change as numeralization and propose a diachronic analysis of its background and trigger. We argue that the shift in category resulted from a combination of two historical facts: (i) the expansion of the category of animacy/personhood/masculinity, in particular the emergence of masculine personal (i.e. virile), and (ii) its grammaticalization via the introduction of a new Acc/Gen syncretism into the paradigms of masculine animate/masculine personal nouns. 1 The reason why they matter to numeralization is because the first instances of viriles using the Acc/Gen syncretism occurred in adnumeral contexts and it was the numeral that sanctioned the presence of the new syncretism by becoming its morphological exponent (when bare, viriles reverted to the old Nom/Acc syncretism). Combining these historical facts with proposals such as Ritter (1993), De Vicenzi (1999), De Vicenzi & Di Domenico (1999), which show that while number is a projecting category, gender is not and is parasitic on number 2 , we propose that the 1 The syncretism became the signature property of the virile in the plural. In the singular, where it began, it was initially also characteristic of animate masculine nouns, however, it soon began spreading to various other groups of nouns (e.g. names of dances, card games, mushrooms, etc.; see Kucała 1978 for a thorough analysis). 2 This proposal also derives Greenberg’s (1963: 74) Universal No. 36: “If a language has the category of gender, it always has the category of number.”