TITLE:
Greek poli and Its Polysemous Semantic Character
AUTHORS:
Zaina Tsouhlaris
KEYWORDS:
Greek Semantics, Quantificational Modifiers, A- and D-Quantifiers, Intensifiers, Scalarity, Degree Quantification
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.14 No.4,
August
28,
2024
ABSTRACT: The semantics of Modern Greek adjective polis “many, much, more, very, a lot” is of ultimate semantic interest. Greek polis “many, much, more, very, a lot” appears to be under the influence of polysemy and grammaticalization as it appears in specific syntactic environments and can be analyzed as a Q-Mod following Tsouhlaris (2011), which makes poli a quantificational operator over mereological set relations, combining with a complex event nominal and its incremental theme participant. It can also be analyzed as a D-quantifier in the sense of Barwise and Cooper (1981) as it appears in a nominal position of determiner combined with a plural countable noun and quantifies over the nominal. As an A-quantifier, poli is also analyzed as a syntactic operator which forms a constituent from some projection of V and finds its first argument in the verb and its second argument in the whole VP. In addition, poli is also a degree intensifier modifying over adjectives and adverbs as shown in this piece of research.