Two "many"-words in Slovenian

experimental evidence for pragmatic strengthening

Penka Stateva (Author), Arthur Stepanov (Author)

Abstract

Slovenian features at least two lexical items that are potential semantic counterparts of the English many, namely "veliko" and "precej", whose meaning appears close to identical. Yet speakers are certain that the two items are not equivalent, although they find intuitively felt differences hard to pinpoint. We argue that "precej" and "veliko" are lexically synonymous, but their meanings are pragmatically strengthened under relevant conditions, which leads to subtle interpretative differences. Specifically, we extend Krifka’s (2007) analysis of double negatives and propose that "veliko" is assigned the stereotypical interpretation of a quantity degree word, whereas "precej" is identified with the non-stereotypical one and consequently relates to moderately big amounts. To support this claim, we report the results of an experiment involving a sentence-picture verification task, which highlight the similarities and contextually determined differences in the use of both determiners. Our results suggest that the interpretation of "precej" is not consistent with relations in the upper part of the proportional scale and is dependent on whether or not it is in direct competition with "veliko" in the appropriate contexts.

Keywords

quantity determiner;Slovenian;pragmatic strengthening;stereotypical interpretation;sentence-picture verification task;

Data

Language:	English
Year of publishing:	2017
Typology:	1.01 - Original Scientific Article
Organization:	UNG - University of Nova Gorica
UDC:	81
COBISS:	4919035
ISSN:	2559-8201
Views:	3635
Downloads:	0
Average score:	0 (0 votes)
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