Approximative adverbs in modern and pre-modern languages

Approximative adverbs such as almost, nearly, approximately and circa have received relatively little attention in historical linguistics. This paper documents how approximative expressions become more frequent as well as more lexically diverse in two European languages, to wit English and Dutch. We argue that this change is not simply a language-internal matter, comparable to, say, the rise of modal verbs in Germanic, but reflects a cultural change as well, one having to do with an increasing concern with precision when it comes to numbers and measures (such as weights or temperatures). We make a distinction among various classes of modified expressions, including numerals, quantifiers and absolute adjectives, and irrealis uses (I almost made a mistake), and show how diachronic developments point toward increasing specialization.