Are minimizers semilexical items? A syntactic-pragmatic analysis

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.31810/RSEL.49.9

Abstract

Minimizers are a wide kind of expressions that refer to prototypes of minimal values and they point out the lowest step on a pragmatic scale. Partitive ones, such as una gota «a drop» or una pizca «a pinch», can be considered a type of quantifiers; but, since their grammatical status is controversial, the aim of this paper is to analyze their pragmatic and grammatical behavior by using data from CREA to determine their categorization. The application of grammatical criteria permits to demonstrate that these minimizers are lexical items. Although their syntactic behavior is different, they can take part as a head in pseudopartitive constructions (adopting a predicate inversion structure) and they can perform syntactic functions within a sentence (arguments or adjuncts). Because of their minimal scalar value, explicatures that project the speaker’s attitude towards the information are generated in negative polarity contexts and, this way, the relevance of the utterance gets increased. These explicatures are obtained by means of different inferential procedures (general or specific), depending on the internal structure and the syntactic behavior of the minimizer expression, whose lexical status is not modified.
Keywords: minimizers; quantification; emphatic negation; conceptual/procedural meaning;
grammatical categories.