Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

(40) J’ai beaucoup mangé de pommes
I have a lot eaten of apples
‘I ate a lot of apples’
Of course, both dialects contain an determiner-like adnominal use of beaucoup,
one that selects for a de phrase complement, and quantifies over individuals. This
determiner maps properties onto generalized quantifiers.
(41) Standard/Québec French:
beaucoup Adn = the function BCP DET , defined as follows:
Let s ∈ N such that 0 < s : | {b :< a 1 ,...,a n ,b >∈
R} ∩ P |> s} □
This is the beaucoup found in argument positions:
(42) a. Beaucoup d’enfants sont venus
a lot of children were come
‘A lot of children came’
b. J’ai vu beaucoup d’enfants
I have seen a lot of children
‘I saw a lot of children’
The proposals about beaucoup that I have made can be straightforwardly generalized
to the other degree quantifiers. For example, I propose that peu Adv ‘little’ is defined in
the following ways in SF and QF.
(43) Standard French:
peu Adv = the function PEU SF , defined as follows:
Let s,t ∈ N such that 0 < s,t