How to express extreme quantity through Italian adverbial partially filled constructions

Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore the linguistic expression of extreme large quantities by focusing on some Italian adverbial constructions characterised by the [a + X NOUN <plural> ] pattern. These constructions can be considered as quantity intensifiers used to express a constructional meaning related to abundance that can be summarised as ‘a lot, in large quantities’. After presenting the syntactic and semantic properties shared by these expressions, a set of data extracted from the web will be analysed with a corpus-driven approach. The goal of the work is twofold: on one side, a comparison between the combinatorial contexts of the selected expressions will be presented and discussed, in order to highlight similarities and differences between them; on the other, a qualitative analysis of a specific multiword, a fiumi , will be proposed.