Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

c. *Marie beaucoup a lu de livres
Marie a lot has read of books
d. *Marie beaucoup lit de livres
Marie a lot reads of books
This is because ‘pre-tensed verb’ is not an acceptable position for the adverb beaucoup.
However, in Old French, splits across a [+Tense] verb were the only type of split
possible. Some examples of split DPs headed by the degree quantifier peu ‘few/little’
(often spelt poi in OF) are shown in (21).
(21) a. poi i a d’aseürment
little it has of assurance
‘There is little assurance’
Anon. Roman de Renart. Branche 10.(c.1200) p. 10, v. 9538
b. car poi i ot de Frans
because few it has of Francs
‘because there are few Francs’
Anon. Aiol (1210), p. 247
c. Poi a mangiet avaine en cet avril
little has eaten oats in this April
‘He has eaten few oats this April’
Anon. Aiol (1210), p. 82
For the purposes of the discussion of the OF data, I will be focussing on the quantifier
peu. beaucoup appears in the language only in Middle French. The OF equivalent of
beaucoup was moult, an element that could modify nouns, verbs, and adjectives 3 . With
the creation of beaucoup in MF, and the lexicalization of the separable intensifying
prefix tres- into an independent word, moult was gradually lost from the language (cf.
3 Actually, during Middle French and some time after, beaucoup and peu could modify adjectives.
They have since lost this ability. In the case of beaucoup, this was doubtlessly due to competition with
très.
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