Damian Herda

The aim of this paper is to contrast the near-synonymous Polish classifiers kupa ‘heap’, sterta ‘pile’, and stos ‘stack’, all of which encode upward-oriented arrangements of objects or substances and thus prototypically combine with concrete inanimate nouns, by means of a collocational analysis conducted on naturally-occurring data derived from the Na­tional Corpus of Polish. The results of the empirical investigation point to a tendency for kupa ‘heap’ to combine predominantly with mass nouns denoting amorphous, frequently natural, stuff, whereas sterta ‘pile’ and stos ‘stack’ exhibit a pronounced predilection for count N2-collocates referring to artefacts. In a similar vein, while both sterta ‘pile’ and stos ‘stack’ typically stand for aggregates formed by a volitional human agent, it is not infrequent for kupa ‘heap’ to classify portions of substances whose shape is a result of the forces of nature or merely constitutes a by-effect of activities intended to achieve goals other than arranging stuff into units. What differentiates between sterta ‘pile’ and stos ‘stack’, however, is that constructional solidity appears a more salient feature of the latter item, hence its capability of applying to vertical collections of entities marked by an orderly internal structure.

Drawing on corpus data, this paper investigates the hypothesis that the delexicalization of the English nouns pile and stack as well as their Polish counterparts sterta ‘pile’ and stos ‘stack’, evidenced by collocational expansion, is to a considerable extent fuelled by the conceptual contiguity between their prototypical concrete N2-collocates and certain abstract notions which may be instantiated by means thereof. It is postulated that this metonymic relation leads to the items gradually loosening their original selectional requirements, thereby contributing to the schematization of their source semantics. The results of an empirical analysis show that the collocational broadening of all of the nouns under scrutiny indeed largely stems from metonymization, yet the tendency is more pronounced in the case of the Polish items, particularly stos ‘stack’. This finding can be accounted for in view of the fact that in contrast to their English equivalents, they have not yet established themselves as schematic quantifiers, as corroborated by their current dictionary definitions, and therefore still heavily rely on the aforementioned conceptual mechanism in their delexicalization.

Based on diachronic data extracted from the available lexicographic sources and historical corpora of Polish, this paper aims at determining whether the initial stage of the adverbialization of indefinite quantifiers of nominal origin typically involves extent modification, degree modification being a posterior development. The results of an investigation into the evolution of the functionalstatusof the commonly used quantifiers trochę ‘a bit’, odrobinę ‘a bit’, as well as masę ‘a lot’ indicate that prior to establishing themselves as degree modifiers, the items function as extent modifiers, i.e. duratives or frequentatives. In their earliest adverbial attestations recorded in the analysed material, the quantifiers under scrutiny modify the duration or frequency of the action denoted by the associated verbal element, or, if the pertinent verb encodes a punctual event, of the resultant state, and only later do they start to combine with scalar predicates, i.e. degree verbs as well as gradable adjectives and adverbs, including adverbials in the form of prepositional phrases. Exceptional in this respect is masę ‘a lot’, as it (still) appears incapable of serving as a degree intensifier

While the attachment of diminutive morphology to concrete nouns, gradable adjectives and adverbs, as well as interjections has already received a well-merited share of attention in Polish, diminutivization of vague quantifiers remains empirically understudied. The present paper takes a first step towards filling in this gap by reporting on a corpus-based investigation of the numeralized partitive garść ‘handful’ and its diminutive variant Garstka ‘handful.dim’. The results of a collocational analysis of both forms corroborate the hypothesis that diminutivization further enhances scalar implications inherent in the base ‘small size’ item, as reflected in the diminutive form’s significantly higher frequency of quantifier attestations. Apart from exhibiting a substantially greater proportion of quantifier uses, the latter element displays an overwhelming predilection for animate N2-collocates, which suggests that diminutivization may not only intensify a paucal quantifier’s expressivity but also lead to conspicuous changes in its distributional profile.