Abstract
The ability of English determiner most to license negative polarity items (NPIs) has long stood as a puzzle for theories that follow Ladusaw (1979) in claiming that NPIs must appear in the scope of downward entailing (DE) operators. Most licenses NPIs such as any and ever in its restrictor but is not downward, or upward, entailing with respect to its restrictor. In this paper, I argue that despite appearances to the contrary, NPIs in the restrictor of most are in the scope of a DE operator. I make crucial use of a recent proposal by Hackl (2009) to compositionally analyze determiner most as a superlative expression. When the semantics of the superlative morpheme is spelled out correctly, this derives the result that most licenses NPIs in its restrictor. In addition, I show that this approach correctly predicts the NPI-licensing properties of relative most, as in English the most students. Finally, I discuss some consequences of this approach for the proper integration of contextual restriction into the semantics of the superlative morpheme.
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