Una migaja de cuantificación: los ‘nombres de tamaño mínimo’ como cuantificadores de grado en el español rural europeo

Recent research has paid special attention to ‘quantifying nouns’ given the ease with which they take part in grammaticalization drifts as quantifiers. The present article addresses the analysis of nouns such as migaja ‘crumb’ and adopts the term ‘small size nouns’ to describe them. This term refers to the relationship between the lexical meaning and the basic grammatical features which support the change into quantifiers once the designative content gets removed. The outcomes of the study are relevant to Spanish dialectology and theoretical linguistics. As for the former, the regional distribution of migaja and its counterparts in the dialects of peninsular and insular Spanish has been charted. As for the latter, the existence of a minimality feature is argued for in line with recent research on quantifying constructions in Spanish. The occurrences of the selected nouns are drawn from the Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural (COSER 2005).