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the two of hearts, the five of spades, the seven of diamonds, the ten of clubs, three of trumps.
4) boats for a certain number of rowers:
a four, an eight.
5) decades:
in the early sixties, in the late fifties, etc.
The meaning of substantivized ordinals is less affected by substantivization and remains the same:
He was the first to come.
She was the fourth to leave.
THE STATIVE
§ 235. The stative denotes a temporary state of a person or a non-person. Unlike such classes of words as
nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs the number of statives functioning in English is limited. There are about
30 stable statives, used both in colloquial and in formal style:
ablaze
adrift
afire
aflame
afloat
afoot
afraid
aghast
aglow
agog
ahead
akin
ajar
alight
alike
alive
aloof
alone
amiss
ashamed
askew
aslant
asleep
aslope
astir
astray
athirst
awake
awry
and about 100 unstable ones, which are seldom used even in formal style and never in colloquial:
ashudder, atwist, atremble, agleam, etc.
Semantically statives fall into five groups describing various states of persons or non-persons:
1. Psychological states of persons:
afraid, aghast, ashamed, aware, agog.
2. Physical states of persons:
alive, awake, asleep.
3. States of motion or activity of persons or non-persons:
afoot, astir, afloat, adrift.
4. Physical states of non-persons:
afire, aflame, alight, aglow, ablaze.
5. The posture of non-persons:
askew, awry, aslant, ajar.
Morphological characteristics
§ 236. From the point of view of their morphological composition the class of statives is homogeneous, that
is all of them have a special marker, the prefix a-: asleep, alive, alone, afire, etc.