On the Grammaticalization of Polish Partitive Nouns into Vague Quantifiers: A Corpus Study

Based on synchronic corpus data, this paper investigates the numeralization of selected Polish partitive nouns, focusing on the role of lexical specificity, persistence, and pluralization in the scrutinized phenomenon. The obtained results reveal that semantically general partitives exhibit the highest degrees of grammaticalization as quantifiers, which accords with the hypothesis related to the facilitating effect of low lexical specificity on grammaticalization processes. The more lexically specific items, in turn, are not only less frequently used in the quantifier function, but they also tend to display traces of conceptual persistence, manifesting itself in collocational preferences which can be seen to hint back at the original semantics of such elements. Nevertheless, in contrast to the case with English, the plural forms of Polish ‘large size’ partitives have not turned out to have developed any productive quantifier uses, which can be explained in terms of analogy to the well-established quantifier trochę ‘a bit’, i.e. the fossilized singular accusative form of the no longer existing feminine noun trocha. Interestingly, a large proportion of Polish partitives undergoing numeralization, including all of those analyzed in this study, are also feminine nouns whose accusative forms end in -ę, which already suggests a certain degree of attraction to the trochę-model.