In my paper, I will explore the diachronic semantics of two almost-approximators in
Hungarian: majdnem (‘almost-M’) and szinte (‘almost-S’). I will show that there is
a neat division of labour between these two: majdnem is an intensional approximator
(possible worlds, cf. Sadock 1981, Nouwen 2006 a.o) whereas szinte is a scalar approximator
(precision standards, cf. Penka 2005, Sauerland & Stateva 2007, Amaral & del Prete
2010, Greenberg & Ronen 2013 a.o.), a situation similar to that observed in Russian
(čut’ ne and počti, cf. Kagan and Wolf 2015). I will show that this can be straightforwardly
derived from the grammaticalization trajectories of the two approximators: majdnem
derives from the adverb majd ‘soon’ (and the expletive negator nem ‘no’) and szinte
derives from an adverb originally meaning ‘by out-ward appearance, superficially’.
These two processes both exhibit semantic bleaching and the semanticization of originally
pragmatically inferred information (Eckardt 2006). With the help of corpus data, I
will also track and explain in terms of competing grammars (Niyogi 2002) how, in certain
environments, majdnem is in the process of crowding szinte out.
