Multiple shifts: new views on pathways and mechanisms of grammaticalization in the English noun phrase KU Leuven
© John Benjamins Publishing Company. In this paper we report on a historical corpus study of English multiple, an adjective which underwent a process of grammaticalization starting from lexical uses with the meaning 'composite', e.g. HR 3617 is a multiple star, to grammaticalized uses as individualizer, paraphrasable as 'different', e.g. She has to perform multiple tasks at the same time, and as quantifier 'several', e.g. I have multiple friends ...