From nominal quantifiers to adverbial modifiers: A corpus investigation with reference to Swedish

Abstract

As has been noted in grammaticalization literature, partitives, i. e. nominals encoding parts, portions, and sets, tend to evolve into vague quantifiers, and then into degree adverbs. However, while this grammaticalization path has already received a fair amount of scholarly attention in English, the extension of such items beyond the nominal domain in Swedish remains an empirically unexplored territory. Thus, based on random samples of attestations extracted from selected Språkbanken corpora, this paper offers a synchronic glimpse into the syntactic expansion of nine Swedish nominal quantifiers, namely droppe ‘drop’, nypa ‘pinch’, smula ‘crumb’, hop ‘heap’, hopar ‘heaps’, hög ‘pile’, högar ‘piles’, massa ‘mass’, and massor ‘masses’. The Swedish results largely coincide with those obtained for English, and demonstrate that in the verbal domain, most of the scrutinized elements reveal a preference for pronominal uses, in which they function as an argument of the verb rather than a genuine degree adverb, but which nonetheless give rise to secondary scalar inferences, whereas in the adjectival domain, a majority of the items exhibit a propensity to combine with the comparative forms of adjectives/adverbs. Both of these environments may therefore be assumed to constitute bridging contexts in the emergence of full-blown degree modifier uses of grammaticalized partitives. It is further shown that there exists a strong positive correlation between the items’ respective degrees of grammaticalization in the quantifier function and their extents of adverbialization, which testifies to the importance of frequency of use in the scrutinized instance of grammaticalization.