Slovenian features at least two lexical items that are potential semantic counterparts of the English many, namely veliko and precej, whose meaning appears close to identical. Yet speakers are certain that the two items are not equivalent, although they find intuitively felt differences hard to pinpoint. We argue that precej and veliko are lexically synonymous, but their meanings are pragmatically strengthened under relevant conditions, which leads to subtle interpretative differences. Specifically, we extend Krifka’s (2007) analysis of double negatives and propose that veliko is assigned the stereotypical interpretation of a quantity degree word, whereas precej is identified with the non-stereotypical one and consequently relates to moderately big amounts. To support this claim, we report the results of an experiment involving a sentence-picture verification task, which highlight the similarities and contextually-determined differences in the use of both determiners. Our results suggest that the interpre...

中文翻译：

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斯洛文尼亚语中的两个“很多”词

斯洛文尼亚语至少具有两个词汇条目，它们是英语许多词汇中潜在的语义对应物，即veliko和precej，其含义似乎几乎相同。尽管他们直觉上很难发现差异，但演讲者确信这两个条目并不相等。我们认为，precej和veliko在词汇上是同义词，但是在相关条件下它们的含义在语用上得到了加强，这导致了细微的解释差异。具体来说，我们扩展了Krifka（2007）对双重否定词的分析，并建议给veliko分配数量级词的定型解释，而precej则定为非定型的，因此与中等数量的量相关。为了证明这一主张，我们报告了一个涉及句子图片验证任务的实验结果，该实验突出了两个确定器在使用中的相似性和上下文确定的差异。我们的结果表明，解释...