‘At least’, ‘at most’ and the ‘extreme’ measure: The Russian scalar limit operator construction po + Adj + mere

Abstract

Scalar limit operators (or superlative scalar modifiers), such as at least and at most, have been shown to develop a range of functions crosslinguistically. This article brings to the discussion evidence from Russian – operators based on the construction po + Adj + mere ‘by + Adj + measure’ – and interprets synchronic patterns of associated functions in light of historical change. The construction has given rise to several lexicalized operators, both minimal and maximal, which, similarly to their counterparts in other languages, evoke different kinds of scales pertaining to representational, evaluative, or illocutionary (rhetorical) domains. A corpus-based analysis of their usage across three centuries has revealed a narrowing down of lexical variation within the construction, attributable to competition of different variants for the speaker's selection, and a reduction of the functional overlap between the variants. The data also suggest reorganization of the functional repertoire within particular variants. For the most frequent operator, po krajnej mere ‘at least’ lit. ‘by the extreme measure’, the share of ‘rhetorical’ observations has increased over the years while that of ‘evaluative’ ones has shrunk.