Comparing adverbs of quantity

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 four classes of adverbial expressions of quantity: frequency adverbs (souvent), relative degree adverbs (beaucoup), absolute degree adverbs ( un peu ‘a bit’) and x-times adverbs (trois fois ‘three times’). These four classes are distinguished on the basis of two properties, which are defined in terms of the type of quantity and quantification over ‘times’ or eventualities respectively. Souvent and beaucoup correspond to relative quantities, while un peu and trois fois are absolute quantities. Souvent and trois fois quantify over times, while beaucoup and un peu do not. The classification can account for a number of properties of the four types of adverbs with respect to scope, selection, iteration, habituality and the possibility of so-called relational readings. The paper focuses on French data, but the same patterns can be found in other languages, such as for instance Dutch and English.