Adverbs and quantification: Degrees versus frequency

Starting out with some intriguing parallels and differences between French beaucoup ‘a lot’ and souvent ‘often’, this paper develops an account of the distributional and semantic properties of degree adverbs as opposed to frequency adverbs. The classification can account for a number of properties of the different types of adverbs with respect to scope, selection, iteration, compatibility with stative tense forms and the possibility of so-called relational readings.