Size nouns in Romanian. Gliding along the quantifying – evaluating continuum

Abstract

The paper looks at size nouns of the type grămadă ‘heap / pile’ in Romanian and classifies them into two categories: size nouns with a comparative interpretation (Doetjes and Rooryck 2003) and size nouns with a quantifying interpretation (Brems 2007; 2010), the latter reading being sometimes contextually extended to a third type of interpretation, the negative evaluation interpretation (Brems 2010). The two major types of readings that size nouns may have are read off a head-complement syntactic structure, typical for pseudopartitive constructions, which size nouns+de+N constitute a subcategory of (Tănase-Dogaru 2017). The comparative interpretation arises as a reflex of the semi-lexicality of the size noun, while the quantifying interpretation is a reflex of the size noun having lost its original lexical meaning, and therefore serving a functional role.