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I recently read this sentence in a story related by a very good writer:
Щен за мной увязался годовалый, за пальто покусывает. Кинула я ему эту слойку – отстал.
In trying to render the meaning of this, it occurred to me that in Russian, it's quite commonplace to postpose numbers from the thing counted in order to express approximation, e.g. года три, долларов пять, etc. I wonder if the writer isn't using this same device here to approximate the dog's age rather than state it outright.
Nope, here it's just an inversion which slightly shifted the focus from the subject (the puppy in this particular case) to the fact that it's one year old. But this doesn't actually mean that this is an approximation.
Compare the following:
За мной увязался пьяный мужик.
and
Да просто мужик увязался за мной пьяный.
Here we're putting emphasis on the fact that the man was drunk, but it's not some rough estimate, it's quite established ;)
