Part of
Current Studies in Slavic LinguisticsEdited by Irina Kor Chahine
[Studies in Language Companion Series 146] 2013
► pp. 297–312
This article discusses the collocations that express the meaning of an indeterminate, large quantity of objects. As our analysis has shown the plurality in these collocations is expressed by two classes of collocators: aggregate nouns (full-meaning words) and nouns with quantificative semantics that do not have a referential meaning, and their usage is based on metaphorical transfer. Despite the fact that aggregate nouns in metaphorical transfer undergo a semantic shift, and, changing their status, fall into the class of quantifiers, their semantic influence in the meaning of collocations is more considerable, than that of collocators with quantificative semantics. Keywords: collocations; quantifiers; semantics; lexical combinability