New Insights into the Idiomatisation of Ncoll-of-Npl Constructions

Resumo

Recently the interest in the diachronic evolution of binominal constructions such as a lot of, a bunch of or a load of has increased considerably (Traugott 2008a, 2008b; Brems 2011; Traugott and Trousdale 2013). Several studies have given evidence of their idiomatisation; that is, their progressive syntactic fixation and loss of lexical meaning, which, over time, resulted in their grammatical status in Present-Day English as periphrastic quantifiers. The study reported here aims at contributing to this line of research by widening the scope of previous studies with a twofold purpose: firstly, to account for the diachronic evolution of four collective-headed constructions with potential quantificational status such as a bunch/couple/host/minority of; and, secondly, to contrast the results obtained with previous studies on a number/majority/group of (Fernández-Pena 2016b, 2017) in an attempt to both determine their degree of idiomatisation and provide all these constructions with a homogeneous characterisation as far as possible