“Cool, cooler, Clooney” – A corpus-based and relevance-theoretic analysis of the superlative heading construction in German

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This article focuses on the intensifying schematic construction [[adj1positive] [adj1comparative] [NP]] that is strongly related to headings, as our corpus analysis reveals. A characteristic of the construction is that, although it structurally exhibits the paradigm of the German adjective comparison, it has a slot for a noun phrase in the third position, where an adjective in the superlative form would normally occur (e. g., Stark, stärker, Dante, ‘Strong, stronger, Dante’). We analyze this construction, which we refer to as a “superlative heading”, from syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives, using 2,835 instances (tokens) from the German Reference Corpus. To explain the formal and semantic peculiarities of the construction, we consider the principle of coercion and approaches to linguistic creativity. The pragmatic effects of the construction as a genre-specific pattern are discussed from a relevance-theoretic perspective. The paper thus combines construction grammar and relevance theory.