Typicality in the Use of English and Spanish Indefinite Quantifiers: A Functional Approach

Quantification is a topic that has traditionally and contemporarily drawn the attention ofnumerous theoretical linguists, whose works are of great interest but slightly less useful-nesswhen it comes to applying their results to applied multilingual fields, such as FLTand translation. The aim of the present paper is to show the findings of an empiricalcontrastive analysis that compares the behaviour of a set of English and Spanish quantifi-ers.On the basis of a first assumption that words are polyfunctional and therefore themapping in the network of relationships across languages is not established among lexicalunits but across functions, this study comes out of a large-scale research which identifiesa series of functions expressed by the most prototypical quantifiers in the two languagesinvolved. The results show that the language potentials related to quantification in Englishand Spanish are similar to a great extent but there are significant differences concerningtheir speech realisations. Both the functions expressed by the selected quantifiers and theirmost frequent collocational patterns have been identified with a priority given to thosethat are typical, thus facilitating the task for applied linguists, teachers and translators whomay benefit from a corpus-based description of the indefinite quantifiers.