Universals in superlative semantics

This paper deals with languages in which a superlative interpretation is typically indicated merely by a combination of a definiteness marker with a comparative marker, including French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Greek ('def+cmp languages'). Despite ostensibly using definiteness markers to form the superlative, these languages all have slightly different patterns of definiteness-marking with superlatives, as the paper will illustrate. To explain how superlative interpretations arise without a superlative morpheme, we propose a mechanism of Definite Null Instantiation for the degree-type standard argument of the comparative. This is the unifying feature of all of the derivations we give, for all of the languages. We propose furthermore that quantity words always measure degrees rather than individuals, and that a predicate of degrees is composed with a predicate of individuals by the same semantic composition rule that is operative in pseudopartitives: Measure Identification. This proposal produces differences between quantity and quality superlatives that manifest themselves differently in different languages. To account for the cross-linguistic variation, we identify a number of pressures that all of the languages in consideration may be subject to, and suggest that different languages have different levels of sensitivity to these pressures.

Syntax, 2008

The standard view of superlatives treats them as a subkind of adjectives. However, in many languages, superlatives require the presence of a determiner, even in the predicate position. This leads to an apparent contradiction, since it is independently known that determiners syntactically combine with extended NP projections and are excluded with APs. This issue is resolved if superlative adjectives always appear in an attributive (modificational) position. Superlative phrases without an overt noun (e.g., in the predicative position) modify a null head noun. I show that this hypothesis immediately explains the restrictions on the distribution of superlatives in languages as diverse as Russian, French, German, Dutch, Breton, Spanish and Portuguese. I propose that the modificational nature of superlative adjectives can be derived from their semantics, and I argue that such a proposal yields a natural explanation of the behavior of superlatives in Hebrew and Persian. Finally, I discuss the interaction between this theory and the standard, movement-based analyses of comparatives and superlatives and provide an explanation for apparent counterexamples.

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

2009

THE SEMANTICS OF ADJECTIVES OF QUANTITY by Stephanie Solt Advisor: Professor William McClure

In this paper, we examined the acquisition of adjectival superlatives such as 'the biggest painting by Picasso.' Sentences that contain such expressions, e.g., "Sally bought the biggest painting by Picasso," are claimed to give rise to up to three possible readings, cross-linguistically: (i) the absolute (ABS) reading: of the paintings produced by Picasso, Sally bought the biggest one; (ii) the relative reading with NP-external focus (REX): of the people who bought paintings by Picasso, it was Sally who bought the biggest one (and not some other buyer); and (iii) the relative reading with NP-internal focus (RIN): of the paintings purchased by Sally, the biggest one was produced by Picasso (and not by some other painter). While the ABS and REX readings are universally available, the RIN is available only in article-less languages (Pancheva & Tomaszewicz 2012; Shen 2014, to appear). In this paper, we look to corpus and experimental data to determine the kinds of readings that English-speaking children are capable of assigning to such superlative expressions. While the spontaneous production data reveal instances of the ABS reading, they tell us little about children's knowledge of the two relative readings. We thus designed an experiment to investigate the availability of the three readings, the results of which reveal evidence for all three readings in 4-year-olds.

We give evidence from a geographically, genetically, and typologically diverse set of languages (drawn from 26 different language families and every continent) for the following typological universal: Regardless of the morphosyntactic strategy used by a language to form superlatives, if superlative morphosyntax can be applied to 'much' or 'many', then the result can be used to express a relative reading (as in Hillary has visited the most continents (out of everyone)) but not necessarily a proportional reading (as in Hillary has visited most of the continents). Thus, no language deploys the regular superlative of 'much'/'many' for the proportional but not the relative reading. We also give a rough estimate of how rare proportional readings for quantity superlatives are: about 10%. Nevertheless, we show that proportional readings arise with a diverse set of strategies for forming superlatives.

2012

Choosing quantity over quality: syntax guides interpretive preferences for novel superlatives Alexis Wellwood ([email protected]) Darko Odic ([email protected]) Department of Linguistics 1401 Marie Mount Hall College Park, MD 20742 USA Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218 USA Justin Halberda ([email protected]) Jeffrey Lidz ([email protected]) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218 USA Department of Linguistics 1401 Marie Mount Hall College Park, MD 20742 USA Abstract Acquiring the correct meanings of number words (e.g., seven, forty-two) is challenging, as such words fail to describe salient properties of individuals or objects in their environment, re- ferring rather to properties of sets of such objects or individu- als. Understanding how children succeed in this task requires a precise understanding not only of the kinds of data children have available to them, but also of the char...

This paper proposes an account for the cross-linguistic distribution of relative readings in different types of superlative constructions. Pancheva and Tomaszewicz (2012) (hereinafter P&T) observe that a relative reading with NP internal focus is available in superlative expressions in some Slavic languages but not English. We look into this reading in greater details and provide a syntactic account for its distribution based on standard locality constraints and semantic assumptions of superlatives.

Journal of Semantics, 1998

The hypothesis that two logical schemes are, more or less directly, involved in the so-called quantificational' readings of superlatives is defended in the present paper. It is argued, in particular, that sentences like, e.g. John can solve the most difficult problem and John cannot solve the easiest problem can be associated with their corresponding quantificational' interpretations, i.e. John can solve any problem and John cannot solve any problem, only in the contexts in which they are uttered, and understood, as the key premises, A and not B, of modus ponendo ponens and modus tollendo tollens, respectively. This hypothesis, it is also argued, gains some generalizations missed in Fauconnier's (I975a, b, I979, 1980) well-known analysis of the relevant phenomena in terms of pragmatic scalarity'. In particular, (i) it can clearly distinguish between contexts in which these quantificational' readings are welcome and contexts in which they are not, (ii) it can naturally account for the alleged similarity' between (existential/universal) any and quantifying' superlatives like the most difficult, the easiest, etc., and, what is important, (iii) it can uniformly characterize the mosaic of the environments in which scalarity' phenomena occur, allowing us to explain what it is about exactly these environments (and not others) that makes them licensers of the quantificational' readings

Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2015

This paper is concerned with two seemingly unrelated properties of superlatives: (i) their inability to take measure phrases, and (ii) their behavior in elliptical constructions. Both of these properties raise a problem fo r current semantic theories of superlatives. From a cross-linguistic perspective, I propose a new semantics of superlatives that removes these problems.