Abstract :
Basing myself on synchronic and diachronic data analysis, I argue in this article that size
nouns (SNs) such as bunch/load(s)/heap(s) of within binominal NPs display synchronic
variation which can be hypothesized to be the result of grammaticalization processes.
Synchronically, I propose that SNs have two major non-head uses, a quantifier use, e.g.
a bunch of people walked in, and a valuing(-quantifying) use, in which the referent is
evaluated rather than quantified. The latter is restricted mainly to bunch/load of, e.g. What
a bunch of gobbledygook. The semantic and syntactic reanalysis of SNs as quantifiers
has recently been acknowledged (e.g. Traugott forthcoming), but the valuing use of SNs
remains largely unrecognized (see Brems 2007). On a theoretical level, it will be argued
that head, quantifier and valuing(-quantifier) SN-uses synchronically have to be studied
as COLLOCATIONALLY CONSTRAINED CONSTRUCTIONS in that the semantico-syntactic parsing
of each SN-use links up with specific collocational patterns (Sinclair 1991). Head uses
are restricted to sets of (un)count concrete nouns, whereas quantifier uses team up with
all sorts of (un)count concrete as well as abstract nouns. Valuing uses show restrictions
to concrete animate and abstract nouns, which they typically evaluate negatively, and
have negative semantic prosody patterns, in which the SNs themselves come to predict
negative collocates (see Louw 1993; Stubbs 1995; Bublitz 1996). The grammaticalization
of SNs will be hypothesized to involve not only processes of semantic generalization and
collocational extension, but also collocational reclusterings characterized by particular
semantic prosody constraints. The latter are not traditionally associated with processes
of grammaticalization and hence offer new insights into the semantic changes that may
accompany grammaticalization.
