From ’big’ to ’much’: On the grammaticalisation of some gradable adjectives in Swedish

In this paper, I give a short description of a language change that can be viewed
as an instance of grammaticalization, namely the transition of the two adjectives
mycken/t and liten/t into quantifiers. Data from the corpus of Swedish drama dialogue reveal that liten/t became a quantifier as early as the 1700s, whereas mycken/t seems to have gone through the same change roughly 150 years later. Inherent plurals (such as pengar, ‘money’) appear to be a promising context for the starting point of the transition. I further illustrate how both quantifiers have weak and strong versions in present-day Swedish, and I argue that weak mycket (myke) has turned into a negative polarity item that is found in negated clauses (but not for example in questions and conditionals), whereas weak lite(t) has turned into a positive polarity item and is found elsewhere. If we assume that weak versions of quantifiers are more frequent than strong ones, and that positive polarity contexts are more frequent than negative ones, we expect the frequency of mycken/t to drop, whereas the frequency of liten/t should rise over time. A preliminary study that seems to confirm this prediction is presented here.