Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

‘There are a lot of countries in our Europe’
Charles Estienne. L’agriculture et maison rustique. (1564). p.27
The distribution of DPs containing peu and beaucoup in the Middle French corpus
is shown in tables 2 and 3. The DFM corpus is roughly twice the size of the TFA
corpus. Therefore, to facilitate the comparison with the OF data on peu, I reduced the
DFM corpus to a size comparable to the corpus of Old French, trying to keep texts of
the same genre as found in the TFA.
Century Continuous DP Split [+Tense] V Split [-Tense] V Total
14 137 1 2 140
15 358 6 4 368
16 127 2 0 129
Total 622 9 6 637
Table 2: Occurrences of DPs with peu in the (adjusted) DFM corpus
Since beaucoup is rarer than peu in the language, to get enough examples, I used
the entire DFM corpus to study this quantifier.
Century Continuous DP Split [+Tense] V Split [-Tense] V Total
14 1 0 0 0
15 187 1 3 191
16 102 1 2 105
Total 290 2 5 297
Table 3: Occurrences of DPs with beaucoup in the DFM corpus
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