Typicality in the Use of English and Spanish Indefinite Quantifiers
A Functional Approach
Quantification is a topic that has traditionally and contemporarily drawn the attention of
numerous theoretical linguists, whose works are of great interest but slightly less useful-ness
when it comes to applying their results to applied multilingual fields, such as FLT
and translation. The aim of the present paper is to show the findings of an empirical
contrastive analysis that compares the behaviour of a set of English and Spanish quantifi-ers.
On the basis of a first assumption that words are polyfunctional and therefore the
mapping in the network of relationships across languages is not established among lexical
units but across functions, this study comes out of a large-scale research which identifies
a series of functions expressed by the most prototypical quantifiers in the two languages
involved. The results show that the language potentials related to quantification in English
and Spanish are similar to a great extent but there are significant differences concerning
their speech realisations. Both the functions expressed by the selected quantifiers and their
most frequent collocational patterns have been identified with a priority given to those
that are typical, thus facilitating the task for applied linguists, teachers and translators who
may benefit from a corpus-based description of the indefinite quantifiers.
Published online: 14 August 2003
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.49.1.04lab
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.49.1.04lab
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Reguera, Ana Medina & Alice Stender
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