How Many Are ‘Several’? Argumentation, Meaning and Layers

In this paper, I present an analysis of the French determiner plusieurs (‘several’). I show that one can account for its two opposite properties, as described in Bacha (1997) and Gondret (1976), namely the fact that (i) plusieurs cannot refer to large quantities and (ii) it is “augmentative” (Gondret) or has a positive argumentative orientation in Ducrot’s sense (Bacha), by hypothesizing that plusieurs is layered. This means that it conveys an asserted piece of information as well as an implicature, like peu (‘little’), un peu (‘a little’), presque (‘almost’), à peine (‘barely’, ‘hardly’) and others. This leads me, in particular, to make the notion of argumentative orientation more precise and to compare plusieurs and quelques (‘some’, ‘a few’), which is a ‘flat’ (non-stratified) determiner.