Semantics and pragmatics of indefinites: methodology for a synchronic and diachronic corpus study

The article discusses the methodology adopted for a cross-linguistic synchronic and diachronic corpus study on indefinites. The study covered five indefinite expressions in five languages: German irgendein, Italian (uno) qualunque, Spanish cualquiera, Dutch wie dan ook and Czech kterýkoli. The main goal of the study was to verify the distribution of these indefinites on the functional map of Haspelmath (1997), and to attest their historical development. 1 Theoretical Background It is well known that the use of expressions with existential meaning (e.g. plain indefinites like English some-body, or German jemand or Czech někdo) can give rise to different pragmatic effects. Although the semantic representation of somebody in (1) and (2) is identical, (1) comes along with a free choice implicature (each individual is a permissible option) and (2) with an ignorance implicature (the speaker does not know who called): (1) You can invite somebody. (2) Somebody called. From a typological perspective, many languages have developed specialized forms for such enriched meanings, for instance as free choice indefinites1: Spanish cualquiera, Italian qualunque, Czech kterýkoli, Hungarian akárki,..., and as epistemic indefinites2: Russian to-series, Czech si-series, German, irgend-series, Spanis