A Sea of Choices: Lexical Quantifiers in English and German

The current paper aims to shed some light on lexical quantifiers in English and German. Certain nouns that are initially used to label notions unrelated to quantity have been observed to gain the ability to appear as quantifiers in quantifying constructions. The particular focus of this study is on lexemes of this sort that are used to convey the meaning “large quantity”, typically in an exaggerated manner. The data for identifying and analyzing these quantifiers was gathered using lexicographical and corpus resources. After producing a comprehensive list of these special “classifiers” for both languages, each lexeme is examined with regard to its collocations and broader context. The analysis of the collected data aims to determine whether previously proposed approaches to the taxonomy of lexical quantifiers of multitude and lexical quantifiers in general (which has been done for Russian, as well as English, Chinese and Korean) are potentially applicable for examining this phenomenon in other languages. These approaches are based on semantic and pragmatic factors, as well as on the extent of grammaticalization demonstrated by the “classifier” of quantity. The results of this study will also contribute to enabling potential research on the typology of lexical quantifiers across different languages.