Semantic oppositions of certainty - uncertainty in the expression of quantitative meanings in languages with different structures

Abstract

The article provides a contrastive description of the semantic oppositions of certainty-uncertainty in the expression of quantitative meanings in such diverse languages as Russian, Kazakh, and English. Based on language examples, the ways of expressing the category of singularity are compared, which consists of three basic components: quantitativeness, objectivity and certainty / uncertainty. It is revealed that the concept of certainty in the compared languages is marked by means of universal quantifiers that express the totality. Particular attention is paid to the semantics of articles in the English language and grammatical ways of expressing indefiniteness in non-article, Russian and Kazakh languages. The article provides examples illustrating the process of grammaticalization of the numeral odin, bir, one. The authors conclude that in the compared languages quantitative values are expressed by means of isomorphic and allomorphic ways of encoding certainty/uncertainty in the usage.