The (Very) Slippery Nature of Truth

The disparate uses of very seen in Modern English evolved starting from Late Middle English with most synchronic uses well-established by the 1500s [Breban and Davidse, 2016]. very moved from marking a binary (i.e. truth) to becoming a scalar operator, and it moved from being narrowly truth-functional to becoming a highly expressive, mirative marker in a range of post-determiner uses as in the examples below.

1. ...who should find it but you? The very person I was most anxious to meet.
2. You’re sitting at the very center of the information flows.
3. The very leaves on the trees turn against humanity in this cautionary thriller...
4. …catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina affect the very brain architecture of children...

We explore the semantic and pragmatic principles underlying this transition, arguing that the development of scalarity and mirativity are intimately connected.