Language & Linguistics Compass

Rett, Jessica

doi: 10.1111/lnc3.12269pmid: N/A

The words many, much, few, and little (and their cross‐linguistic counterparts) are quite unusual semantically. They have traditionally been characterized as quantifiers (like every) or adjectives (like tall); however, these analyses can only account for instances of these terms in which they encode information about an individual or a set of individuals, as they do when they occur prenominally (in e.g., much traffic). Recent degree‐semantic analyses instead characterize the meaning of these words in terms of intervals or sets of degrees; this accounts for their canonical uses and uses in which they don't appear to be ranging over individuals (as in their differential use, e.g., much taller).