Quelques in French: a Clustered Plural

Abstract

We present the result of a corpus study on the difference between quelques ‘a few’ and plusieurs ‘several’. On this basis, we propose a categorization of the nouns significantly attracted by quelques and argue for an understanding of the distinction in topological terms ( Grimm, 2012a, 2012b; Wągiel, 2018, 2019). A series of observations, focusing successively on the aggregate nouns (pomme de terre ‘potato’), a sub-class of ‘fence’ nouns (gribouillis ‘scrawl’) and the mass plurals (victuailles ‘victuals’) leads us to argue that quelques Npl ‘a few Npl’ is a ‘clustered’ plural, which is true of a (more or less) cohesive set of connected entities, while plusieurs ‘several’ quantifies over sets of maximally strongly self-connected (mssc) entities. We will show that this principle can also be generalized to the temporal domain. We shall see that this distinction between the two determiners has numerous consequences on atomicity, the mass-count distinction, the possibility of counting individuals, and especially, on the existence of an individuation scale in the nominal domain.