Mar 19, 2015
terrorfish replied to your post:
I use it as Op says, and when I say I've heard a song 'once or twice' I feel my audience understands I mean more than literally 1 or 2 times, and probably a lot of times. I also use it as "several".
Mmkay. I mean, to answer their question about methodology, that’s something that could be explored through NLP and corpus work. You know, look for occurrences of the phrase, check the surrounding context, compare against contexts for queries like “a few times” or whatever you see as its possible equivalents. That sort of thing. That doesn’t match my intuition about its use in my own idiolect, but that’s how you could research the issue objectively.
