TY - JOUR
TI - Paucal Quantifiers and Diminutive Morphology in the Light of Numeralization: The Case of Polish garść ‘handful’ and garstka ‘handful.dim’
AU - Herda, Damian
TI - Paucal Quantifiers and Diminutive Morphology in the Light of Numeralization: The Case of Polish garść ‘handful’ and garstka ‘handful.dim’
AB - 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.
VL - Volume 15 (2020)
IS - Vol. 15, Issue 2
PY - 2020
SN - 1732-8160
C1 - 2300-5920
SP - 59
EP - 83
DO - 10.4467/23005920SPL.20.003.12883
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/studies-in-polish-linguistics/article/paucal-quantifiers-and-diminutive-morphology-in-the-light-of-numeralization-the-case-of-polish-garsc-handful-and-garstka-handful-dim
KW - vague paucal quantifiers
KW - numeralization (grammaticalization)
KW - diminutivization
KW - corpusbased study
KW - Polish