Linguist Forum

Specializations => Semantics and Pragmatics => Topic started by: Natalia on November 04, 2018, 02:31:49 PM

Title: The meaning of "some"
Post by: Natalia on November 04, 2018, 02:31:49 PM

In English, "some" means "unspecified number/amount". So, it doesn't matter if there are five, ten, fifteen or twenty chairs in a room, I can still say "There are some chairs in the room"?

Title: Re: The meaning of "some"
Post by: Daniel on November 04, 2018, 03:26:20 PM

That's basically right.

At some point, if there are many chairs, you would say "there are a lot of chairs". But that's emphatic, and it's technically true that "some" just means "more than zero" [more than one, if used in the plural] and probably "not all" (but that's a scalar implicature not a strict requirement).