Quantification in pedazos (‘pieces’) or cachos (‘chunks’): “Size nouns” as degree quantifiers in oral varieties of contemporary european Spanish

Abstract

The study traces the dialectal areas of cacho, pedazo (y trozo) (all nouns meaning ‘piece, chunk’) and points to urban varieties as the center of creation and diffusion of their change into adnominal degree quantifiers or modifiers (cacho de idiota ‘such an idiot!’, pedazo de chalé ‘such a villa!’). Spanish nouns cacho and pedazo are defined as a type of quantifying nouns, namely, “size nouns”. Taking these nouns as a case study, this article focuses on how lexical features fade through a “desemanticization” process. Based on previous research on elative constructions in Spanish, the article puts forward the hypothesis that a maximality feature ([max] feature) comes out from the lexical components of these nouns. An empirical corpus is retrieved from oral records of contemporary varieties of European Spanish. An additional corpus of “fictional orality” is also employed.