Bibliogr. s. 32

Apart from degree adverbs derived from adjectives, such as wysoce 'highly' or starkt 'strongly,' both Polish and Swedish possess a set of grammaticalized partitive nominals which perform the function of degree modification, e.g. odrobina 'crumb; a little' and smula 'crumb; a little,' as used in odrobinę lepszy 'a little better' and vänta en smula 'wait a little,' respectively. Analysing English data, Traugott (2008) observes that in order for such an item to grammaticalize into a degree adverb, it must first acquire the status of an indefinite quantifier, in which case it still co-occurs with nominal collo-cates, yet solely encodes the abstract notion of quantity. Accordingly, this process can be schematized as follows: partitive ('a part/unit of') > quantifier ('a small/large quan-tity of') > degree modifier ('to a small/large degree/extent'). On the basis of linguistic material extracted from a number of lexicographic sources, it is argued here that the validity of the above-described grammaticalization path can likewise be extended to the history of the two aforementioned nouns, viz. the Polish lexeme odrobina 'crumb; a little' and its Swedish counterpart smula 'crumb; a little,' both of which developed the adverbial sense only after having established themselves as vague quantifiers.