ABSTRACT
Verbal affixes combine adverbial meanings (temporal, spatial, directional, manner) with quantificational meanings (cardinality/measure, proportion and distributivity). While in Slavic languages adverbial meanings are also optionally expressed by adverbials and quantificational meanings by determiner quantifiers, in English the expression of these meanings is more constrained. The basic ‘accumulative’ meaning is manifested in a variety of ways, depending on the lexical semantics of the classes of the base verbs with which na- combines, and on the linguistic and extra-linguistic context. Both the verbal affix and the incremental theme argument are used to signal that a free variable is introduced into the scope of the quantification. The hypothesis also sheds light on the seemingly complicated ways in which the noun phrases with determiner quantifiers, numerals and other expressions of quantity interact with aspect and that have puzzled linguists working on the Slavic languages.
