Quantification is central to human experience (cf. Aristotle's Organon): the most basic aspects
of human life and reasoning involve quantity assessment. This study sheds lights on a highly
frequent way to express quantification in Spanish viz. the binominal quantifier (e.g. un
aluviónN1 de llamadasN2 'a flood of calls') which assesses the quantity of N2 in terms of N1.
This volume offers a corpus-based cognitive-functional analysis of binominal quantifiers (BQ)
in Spanish. The first part is dedicated to the development of BQs and starts from the
assumption that BQs are cross-linguistically involved in grammaticalization. This monograph
frames the history of BQs in Spanish in terms of constructional levels of change and highlights
the complex interplay between analogical thinking and conceptual persistence. The second part
motivates both the ample variation in the paradigm of quantifying nouns and their combinatorial
pattern by the very same mechanism of conceptually-driven analogy. The study thus yields an
innovative functional model of BQs in Spanish in synchrony and in diachrony with major
implications for reference grammars and theory building.
