Two “many”-words in Slovenian - Experimental evidence for pragmatic strengthening
Two “many”-words in Slovenian - Experimental evidence for pragmatic strengthening

Summary/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.

• Details
• Contents