Substantivisation of adjectives

In many languages adjectives can become nouns (ученый, рабочий, мороженое). This means of word building is called conversion or zero-derivation. Substantivized adjectives acquire grammatical features of noun – the plural form and the genitive case (natives, sensitives, cutes, relative’s). They can also have articles.

On the other hand, among the substuntivized adjectives there is a set characterized by hybrid lexico-grammatical features: the poor, the rich, the killed, the wounded. The have an incomplete set of the part-of-speech characteristics of either nouns or adjectives. Like nouns, the words are used in the article form; like nouns, they express the category of number: they have two subgroups – pluralia tantum (the English, the rich), and singularia tantum (the invisible, the abstract), but their article and number forms are rigid, not subject to change. This group is open, as this means of word building is productive.