From 'big' to 'much' : On the grammaticalization of two gradable adjectives in Swedish
In this paper, I give a short description of a language change that can be viewed as an instance of grammaticalization, namely the transition of the two adjectives mycken/t and liten/t into quantifiers. Data from the corpus of Swedish drama dialogue reveal that liten/t became a quantifier as early as the 1700s, whereas mycken/t seems to have gone through the same change roughly 150 years later. In
