[Ads-l] Ever pondered this question?

[Mark Mandel]

Laurence,I think you must have meant approximately

Unfortunately there were {a few/??few/several} errors in the manuscript.

MAM


On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 8:43 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> I think it’s important in this discussion to distinguish “a few”, which is
> essentially a positive quantifier, from “few”, which is negative.  This is
> also true of the corresponding mass quantifiers “a little” (positive) vs.
> “little” (negative), and counterparts in French, “un peu” (positive) vs.
> “peu” (negative).  Linguists have written extensively about these words
> (Oswald Ducrot on the French ones, everyone from Dwight Bolinger to me on
> the English ones), citing considerable evidence for this distinction.
> Consider, for example:
>
> Few if any
> Few or none
> *A few if any
> *A few or none
>
> You’re going to have a little difficulty with that, in face you may have a
> lot of difficulty/*no difficulty at all
> You’re going to have little difficulty with that, in face you may no
> difficulty at all/*a lot of difficulty
>
> Few economists have ever pondered this question.
> *A few economists have ever pondered this question.
>
> The psychologists Linda Moxey and Sanford wrote a number of papers and a
> book supporting the psychological reality of these distinctions.
>
> It’s “a few” that’s a fairly close paraphrase of “several”, not the
> negative “few”:
>
> *Several economists have ever pondered this question.
>
>
> *Unfortunately there were a few/several errors in the manuscript.
> ??Unfortunately there were a few/several errors in the manuscript.*
>
> LH
>
>

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