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.

The article reports the commencement of the process of change of the syllable pattern in Polish, consisting in the syllabification of liquid sonorants in some contexts in less sonorous segmental environment (in final clusters with an obstruent in the first position). A short pilot study was conducted, in which the pronunciation of the word wiatr ‘wind’ was analysed.