On the relative position of beaucoup, guère, peu, rien and trop in French

Abstract

My purpose in this article is to examine a few French adverbs and quantifiers, not considered in Cinque ‟99 and to try to determine their position in the hierarchy pro-posed there. Most of them actually belong to both categories. In fact, while rien „noth-ing‟ can be used only as a negative quantifier, beaucoup „a lot‟, peu „little‟, trop „too much‟, guère „not much‟ can be used either as quantifiers or as adverbs. It would be difficult to establish whether they are actually the same words being used in two ways - as bare quantifiers and as quantificational adverbs - or distinct homonymic words.