To be “a Boat Load Healthier” and not to “Care a Single Scrap” : on the adverbialization of English size nouns
While the grammaticalization of English size nouns into vague quantifiers has already received a considerable amount of scholarly attention, their subsequent syntactic expansion beyond the nominal domain remains an under-researched area. In particular, little has hitherto been written about the p...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2022
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19923/1/49801-184418-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19923/ https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1518 |
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| Summary: | While the grammaticalization of English size nouns into vague quantifiers has already received a
considerable amount of scholarly attention, their subsequent syntactic expansion beyond the
nominal domain remains an under-researched area. In particular, little has hitherto been written
about the possible factors contributing to the emergence of additional adverbial uses of such items.
Based on synchronic corpus data, this paper therefore aims to partially fill in this gap by providing
an analysis of the adverbialization patterns of nine nominal forms of this kind, namely bit, scrap,
shred, heap, heaps, load, loads, lot, and lots, whose empirical tokens have been classified into six
categories: (i) verbal inherent modification, (ii) verbal extent modification, (iii) adverbial
ambiguous, (iv) object-pronominal, (v) adjectival modification of positives, and (vi) adjectival
modification of comparatives. The results demonstrate that in the verbal domain, most of the
analyzed forms reveal a preference for pronominal uses, in which they function as an argument of
the verb rather than a genuine degree adverb, while in the adjectival domain, a majority of the
items, especially ‘large size’ nouns, exhibit a conspicuous propensity to combine with the
comparative forms of adjectives/adverbs. Moreover, it is shown that there exists a strong positive
correlation between the items’ respective degrees of grammaticalization in the quantifier function
and their extents of adverbialization, operationalized as the proportion of pertinent attestations in
corpus samples. Thus, the study underscores the role of frequency in grammaticalization on the
one hand, and points to the importance of paradigmatic analogy on the other. |
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