37.2978, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 - What Can Be More or Less? The Notion of Degree and Its Realizations in Natural Languages (Slovakia)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2978. Thu Sep 17 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2978, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 - What Can Be More or Less? The Notion of Degree and Its Realizations in Natural Languages  (Slovakia)

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Date: 16-Sep-2026
From: Olivier DUPLATRE [olivier.duplatre at sorbonne-universite.fr]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2027 - What Can Be More or Less? The Notion of Degree and Its Realizations in Natural Languages


Workshop at SLE 2027 - What Can Be More or Less? The Notion of Degree
and Its Realizations in Natural Languages

Date: 25-Aug-2027 - 28-Aug-2027
Location: Košice, Slovakia
Contact: Olivier Duplâtre
Contact Email: olivier.duplatre at sorbonne-universite.fr

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; General Linguistics;
Pragmatics; Semantics; Typology

Submission Deadline: 10-Nov-2026

The notion of degree, which, according to the Latin etymon grădŭs
‘step’, ‘scale’, implies the possibility of increase and decrease,
could be argued to go back to Aristotle’s Categories:
 - Qualifications admit of a more and a less; for one thing is called
more pale or less pale than another, and more just than another.
(10b26)
This shift from increase to decrease and vice versa raises the
question of the relationship between degree and comparison. Comparison
involves establishing an ordering between two or more values, whereas
degree may be understood as the position of a value on a scale.
Ancient grammars treat degree in terms of adjectival comparison (See
the Tekhnē of Dionysius Thrax). However, the Stagirite has a much
broader notion of more and less than the later grammatical tradition,
since more or less can also apply to verbs:
 - Doing and being-affected admit […] of a more and a less. For it is
possible to heat more and less […] and to be pained more and less.
(11b1)
Modern linguistics likewise provides evidence for gradable verbal
predicates. (See Greenbaum 1970; Bolinger 1972; Abeillé/Godard 2003
among others). Modern analysts also apply gradability to adverbs
(Quirk et al 1985; Hengeveld 2023), nouns (Morzycki 2009),
prepositional phrases or even, somewhat controversially, to
prepositions:
 - But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak? (As you like it,
III,2)
 - The nail went right (through) the wall (Quirk et al. 1985: 449)
A sentence such as I must absolutely do that, raises particularly
interesting questions. Does the modal verb provide a dimension
(Kennedy 1999; Kennedy & McNally 2005), i.e. a parameter "indicating
the kind of measurement" involved and allowing degrees of necessity to
be ordered on a scale, or is it the adverb itself that constructs the
dimension? Or is the dimension constructed compositionally by the
modal verb and the adverb together?
On a more general level, if degree is fundamentally based on “more and
less”, how do we distinguish degree from quantity and measurement?
Should we posit, following Sapir (1944), that grading precedes
measurement and is thus different from measurement? Regarding the
example:
 - He drinks/runs excessively,
we might say that the adverb refers to a certain quantity and that
this quantity “presupposes” (Sapir 1944: 93) grading.  But on closer
examination, excessively does not only specify a quantity; it also
expresses a degree that goes beyond a contextually given quantitative
norm, illustrating a three-step pathway, from degree to quantity and
back to degree, which clearly shows that quantity and degree are
fundamentally different. One may note in addition that run, unlike
drink, does not give access to a quantity dimension at first sight: it
may pertain to speed, duration, frequency and so on, which shows that
the relevant dimension must be constructed contextually.
This kind of examples raises another question: how can we distinguish
degree from manner? Does degree express manner in the absence of a
genuine manner expression (Duplâtre & Duffley, 2026) or are both
expressed simultaneously?
Conversely, it seems that manner can give rise to a degree reading:
 - An easily debatable proposition (Quirk et al. 1985: 448)
Manner also provides a dimension allowing for the expression a degree:
 - He plays well, very well, surprisingly well, etc.
Aspect may likewise provide a basis for grading interpretations
inasmuch as adverbial expressions may express the different degrees of
completion of the process. This is the case with I understand a
little, well, or totally. Should we say that the description of the
different phases of an event provides favorable conditions for the
expression of degree to emerge?  This would mean that degree is
independent from intensification and sensitive to the availability of
a dimension, whether it be a manner dimension or an aspectual
dimension.
Generally, the most striking fact is the plasticity of degree
expressions: epistemic modality (see German wirklich (van Os 1989))
can give rise to degree; this is also the case for evaluative adverbs
(He played surprisingly well (Quirk et al. 1985: 449)) or pragmatic
adverbs (I’m frankly surprised (Ibid., 447)). Is degree then
secondary¬—a mere effect (Ibid., 448 ; Paradis 1997:19)? Or should
these examples be analyzed as cases of polyfunctionality? Since not
all of these occurrences encode degree lexically, does degree result
from the interaction between two contents or from the syntactic
context or from both?
Adverbs are not the only means of expressing gradability: it can also
be expressed by repetitions, comparatives and superlatives, prefixes,
suffixes, word order and intonation. All these devices vary
considerably across languages and are an inexhaustible source of
creativity. For instance, in this example from Hamlet (II, 2), the
domain expression north-north-west provides a directional scale which
allows the dimension of madness to emerge, thus giving rise to a
grading effect:
 - I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a
hawk from a handsaw.
This kind of effect does not seem to be associated with the specific
prosodic parameter that Paradis (1997: 20) identifies as expressing
contrastive focus. Should we therefore dismiss this kind of effect, or
should we broaden the class of scalar modifiers identified by Paradis?
While the number of degree expressions seems amazingly vast, there are
nevertheless things that cannot be more or less:
 - 11a5. Triangle and square do not seem to admit of a more, nor does
any other shape. (Aristotle, Categories)
However, this impossibility does not only rely on mathematical
principles. As pointed out by Greenbaum (1970) and Allerton (2002:
139), there may exist collocational restrictions:
 - to deeply hate, *to deeply like
 - to severely injure, * to severely disappoint
Pragmatic factors are also essential to the use and emergence of
intensifiers: absolutely, for instance, serves to “convince other
people or oneself” (Bäcklund 1973: 222) and really (Labov 1984: 43-44)
“acts to intensify the main predication” by “designating a state of
reality greater than normal”, thus expressing the speaker’s
“commitment to the proposition".
Intensifiers may also develop into Common Ground Management operators
(see You should totally click on that link; Beltrama 2018). What,
then, is the difference between an intensifier and a discourse
particle?
Finally, such items may also reveal the membership in a given speech
community. (see the teenage intensifier pure (Macaulay 2006))
This raises a more general question: are pragmatic factors decisive in
the emergence, grammaticalization or decline of degree expressions?
This workshop welcomes any and all proposals concerning the history of
the concept of degree, its definition, its syntactic and pragmatic
realizations in any language, whether it be a cross-linguistic study
or one devoted only to a particular language. All theoretical
frameworks are accepted.



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