Grachova I. Formation of Quantifiers in English (7th - 17th centuries).

This thesis addresses one of the topical issues related to the theory of parts of speech development in historical studies in English - the formation of quantifiers (7th - 17th c.), which is viewed from radical re-analysis perspective. In the dessertation the notions of "pre-quantifiers" and "floating quantifiers" have been examined. The basic syntactical distributions of this class of words have been researched as its diagnostic features which help to differentiate the pre-quantifiers among other lexico-grammatical units including homonymous adjectives. The tendencies of distinguishing this class of words were traced in Old and Middle English; in Early New English (16th-17th c.) quantifiers started to demonstrate new distributional characteristics such as predeterminative, nominative, structural position with the preposition of. In the given research the grammatical status of quantifiers has been also identified and the peculiarities of their structural and semantic combinations have been revealed in the diachronic aspect.