Two “many”-words in Slovenian

Slovenian features at least two lexical items that are potential semantic counterparts of theEnglish many, namely "veliko" and "precej", whose meaning appears close to identical. Yet speakers arecertain that the two items are not equivalent, although they find intuitively felt differences hard to pinpoint.We argue that "precej" and "veliko" are lexically synonymous, but their meanings are pragmaticallystrengthened under relevant conditions, which leads to subtle interpretative differences. Specifically, weextend Krifka’s (2007) analysis of double negatives and propose that "veliko" is assigned the stereotypicalinterpretation of a quantity degree word, whereas "precej" is identified with the non-stereotypical one andconsequently relates to moderately big amounts. To support this claim, we report the results of an experimentinvolving a sentence-picture verification task, which highlight the similarities and contextually determineddifferences in the use of both determiners. Our results suggest that the interpretation of "precej" is not consistent with relations in the upper part of the proportional scale and is dependent on whether or not it is in direct competition with "veliko" in the appropriate contexts