In linguistics, a minimizer is a word or phrase that denotes a very small quantity which is used to reinforce

negation In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false ...

. For example, "red cent" in the sentence "I'm not paying him a red cent" (meaning, "I'm not paying him any money") is a minimizer. Minimizers are usually analysed as a subclass of negative polarity items, and are often limited to negative contexts. For example, statements like "I paid him a red cent" or "I care a wit" would be considered

unacceptable Acceptability is the characteristic of a thing being subject to acceptance for some purpose. A thing is acceptable if it is sufficient to serve the purpose for which it is provided, even if it is far less usable for this purpose than the ideal ex ...

. In English and other languages, minimizers constitute the largest and most

productive Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...

class of negative polarity items.

History

The term ''minimizer'' was coined by linguist

Dwight Bolinger Dwight Le Merton Bolinger (August 18, 1907 – February 23, 1992) was an American linguist and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He began his career as the first editor of the "Among the New Words" feature for ...

in his 1972 book ''Degree Words'', where he described them as "partially stereotyped equivalents of ''any''". The phenomenon had previously been remarked upon by other scholars as far back as

August Friedrich Pott August Friedrich Pott (14 November 1802 in Nettelrede, Hanover5 July 1887 in Halle) was a German pioneer in linguistics. Pott was a theology student at the University of Göttingen, where he became interested in philology. He became a schoolm ...

in 1859.

Quirk Quirk or Quirks is having unconventional beliefs or manner, for example mispronouncing, in-jokes, clumsy and ditsy, and may refer to: * ''The Quirk'', a literary magazine * "Quirks", a song by Ultravox! from the album ''Ha!-Ha!-Ha!'' * 18376 Qui ...

et al. use the term in their 1985 ''

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language ''A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language'' is a descriptive grammar of English written by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. It was first published by Longman in 1985. In 1991 it was called "The greates ...

'', classifying minimizers as a subclass of "downtoners" (alongside "approximators", "compromisers", and "diminishers"). Unusually, they include in this category adverbs like ''barely'' and ''hardly'' which themselves encode negation.

Polarity

Minimizers are usually treated as a kind of

negative polarity item In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation and negation, affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI ...

, though this point of view has been challenged. Under negation, the minimizer is interpreted metaphorically as the absence of even a minimal quantity – i.e. nothing at all. Like other negative polarity items, minimizers can, in addition to negative contexts, also occur in other non-affirmative contexts such as questions and conditionals, as in: : Do you have a drop of water to spare? : If you tell a soul, your career is over.

Positive contexts

Some minimizers cannot be used in affirmative contexts (except perhaps for deliberate comedic effect), for example: : * I slept a wink last night. : * I give a hoot about your poem. Other terms used as minimizers may simply refer literally to a small fixed quantity when used in positive contexts, such as: : I paid him a dime. : She said a word.

Range of meanings and origins

Minimizers are a highly

class, and new examples can be readily formed from a variety of domains. Early surveys of minimizers across a range of living and dead languages found that some recurring categories included: * Small items of food (e.g. a cherrystone, an egg, a fig, a grain, a parsnip) * Coins of little value (e.g. a ''dinero'', a ''sou'', a dime) * Animal and body parts (e.g. a cat's tail, a hair, a sparrow) * Other miscellaneous objects of little value or relevance (e.g. a pinecone, a shred, a nail) Another category of minimizers is

superlative Comparison is a feature in the morphology or syntax of some languages whereby adjectives and adverbs are inflected to indicate the relative degree of the property they define exhibited by the word or phrase they modify or describe. In languages t ...

expressions such as "the foggiest idea" or "the slightest inkling". Some minimizers are limited to very specific, fixed idiomatic verb phrases (e.g. "move a muscle", "lift a finger", "sleep a wink"), whereas others are highly versatile, such as the semantically bleached ''shit'': : I'm not paying him shit. : I'm not saying shit without a lawyer present. : You can search my car, but you're not going to find shit. Other minimizers are limited to representing only a certain kind of quantity. For example, ''word'' may only be used with predicates which take an object of a linguistic nature: : She didn't speak a word. : I don't believe a word of your story. : I can't understand a word of Italian. : # He doesn't care a word about his colleagues. (The ''#'' symbol marks the last sentence as infelicitous.)

Role in language change

Minimizers are one linguistic element which may develop over time into a marker of sentential negation. For example, negation in French is usually marked with the pre-verbal particle ''ne'' and the negative marker ''pas'', as in ''Je ne sais pas'' ("I don't know"). ''pas'' derives from the Latin ''passum'' ("step"), hence "ne... pas" derives from a construction meaning "not a step". In early French, ''pas'' could be interchanged with other minimizer nouns such as ''goutte'' ("drop") or ''mie'' ("crumb"). Similar developments have occurred in other Romance languages. In this way, minimizers have been implicated in Jespersen's cycle, in that a language with pre-verbal negation may develop toward obligatory pre- and post-verbal negation by the

grammaticalization In historical linguistics, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (such as affixes or p ...

of a minimizer which initially is used optionally for emphasis or some other pragmatic purpose.

Vulgar minimizers

A particular class of English minimizers based on vulgar or profane language have been observed to have a distinctive property. Like other minimizers, they can appear in non-affirmative contexts with a meaning of "anything", but they can also be used in affirmative contexts, where they seem to take on the meaning "nothing". For example, the following pair of sentences have identical meanings: : He doesn't know jack shit about politics. : He knows jack shit about politics. Other English examples in this category (which

Paul Postal Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936 in Weehawken, New Jersey) is an American linguist. Biography Postal received his PhD from Yale University in 1963 and taught at MIT until 1965. That year, he moved to the City University of New York. In ...

gives the label "SQUAT") include ''dick'', ''diddley-squat'', ''fuck-all'', and ''shit''. The same phenomenon has been observed for some vulgarisms in Catalan (e.g. ''una merda'', "a shit"; ''un carall'', "a penis") and Spanish (e.g. ''tres cojones'', "three testicles"; ''un mojón'', "a turd"). Some uses of vulgar

intensifier In linguistics, an intensifier (abbreviated ) is a lexical category (but ''not'' a traditional part of speech) for a modifier that makes no contribution to the propositional meaning of a clause but serves to enhance and give additional emotional co ...

s serve the same semantic function as minimizers, as for example in the statement, "I'm not paying him a frickin cent" (compare "I'm not paying him a red cent").

Citations

References

* * * * * * {{cite book, title=The Oxford Handbook of Negation, editor-last1=Déprez, editor-first1=Viviane, editor-last2=Espinal, editor-first2=M. Teresa, year=2020 , ref={{harvid, OHN, 2020 Semantics Grammar