Superlative Morpheme Research Articles

Anti-Locality and Covert Movement in Arabic

This paper provides a new argument for the specifier-to-specifier anti-locality constraint from covert movement. The argument is based on an observed asymmetry behavior of the Quantifier Raising (QR) of the superlative morpheme in two superlative adjectives modifying relative clauses in Levantine Arabic (LA): the two superlative modifiers give rise to different paradigms of high and low interpretations. The paper shows that a configuration restricted by the specifier-to-specifier anti-locality constraint straightforwardly explains the asymmetry lending further evidence supporting this syntax-economy condition from covert movement. The data discussed in this paper follow from the authors’ native speaker intuitions. To replicate the judgements, five native speakers of Jordanian Arabic were consulted: three males and two females who are in their late twenties or late thirties. All consultants, including the author(s), are based in Eastern Amman; an urban area of the capital Amman of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It is worth mentioning that Jordanian Arabic is a dialect of Southern Levantine Arabic. It is one of the mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic that is spoken by the people of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The two dialects are used in daily conversational exchange along with the most official diglossia of Modern Standard Arabic used in official written documentation and mass media (See Ababneh et al., 2017; Fukara, 2022; Zyoud & Zyoud, 2022 and Abu Helal, 2021a) for more information).

The anatomy of Chinese Superlative Modifiers

Abstract This paper studies the morpho-semantics of a particular class of scalar focus adverbs called Superlative Modifiers (SMs). One key feature of these scalar focus adverbs is that they bear degree morphology, along with gradable adjectives involved. Most analyses of SMs in the market do not take into consideration the semantic contributions of their morphology. However, the cross-linguistic facts strongly suggest that the morphological makeup of SMs cannot simply be a linguistic coincidence. Thus, SMs have posed a long-standing and intriguing morpho-semantic puzzle: Why do SMs morphologically involve a quantity adjective (Q-adjective) and the superlative morpheme? What is the role of Q-adjectives and the superlative morpheme inside SMs? How are these morphological pieces of SMs connected with their semantics? This paper is dedicated to these questions by focusing on two expressions of Mandarin SMs, zui-duo and zui-shao (which morphologically consist of only the superlative morpheme zui and a quantity adjective duo ‘many/much’ or shao ‘few/little’), and presents a decompositional analysis of both expressions as modified superlatives. If the proposed analysis is on the right track, it shows that insights and tools developed in studies on gradability (Kennedy 1999) can be applied to those on scalarity. Recently, Greenberg (2016; 2017) has argued for a gradability-based semantics of English even. This paper contributes to this growing research agenda, through a detailed case study of SMs, a class of scalar focus adverbs but bearing degree morphology and gradable adjectives. Moreover, this paper also deepens our understanding of the semantics of Q-adjectives. By studying SMs, this paper shows that the measured domain of Q-adjectives need not be structured by the part-of relation, but rather the natural ordering on the relevant domain. Crucially, this updated view on Wellwood’s (2014; 2015) semantics of Q-adjectives leads us to their differential uses and ultimately a unified account of Q-adjectives.

The most, the fewest and the least: On the relative readings of quantity superlatives

This paper makes the empirical observation that so-called ‘NP-internal relative readings’ are available for certain speakers of English (as well as Dutch) for quantity superlatives but never for superlatives of other gradable adjectives. Previous accounts of this phenomenon in other languages attribute the availability of this type of reading to the absence of a definite article or DP layer. Contra the predictions of such accounts, in English, it is when the nominal expression containing the quantity superlative appears to be definite that these readings are generated. I account for these readings by building on the theory that many/much and their antonyms are fundamentally degree-predicates of scalar intervals, not degree-predicates of individuals. This leads me to propose a novel syntactic configuration in which the definite article forms a measure phrase constituent with the quantity superlative to the exclusion of the focused element. The NP-internal relative reading is derived through focus-association, with the superlative morpheme remaining in situ inside the definite measure phrase. The proposal adds to an emerging consensus that the quantity expressions much, many, few and little and their crosslinguistic counterparts are of a distinct type and are syntactically more complex than other gradable adjectives. It also provides indirect support for an in situ approach to deriving the relative readings of superlatives in definite contexts. EARLY ACCESS

Binding into superlative descriptions

Attributive superlative adjectives are famously ambiguous between readings in which they compare elements of the description they modify, and readings in which they compare competitors to some description-external element of the sentence. The literature is braided with two analytical origin stories for these different interpretations. One strand of analysis attributes the difference in meaning to a difference in the compositional scope of the superlative morpheme. The other attributes the difference to a difference in how the superlative's implicit domain of quantification is resolved. Here, I present new data showing that pronouns in superlative descriptions have sloppy readings, akin to familiar cases of adverbial association with focus, and I argue that these readings are compatible with scope-taking analyses, but cannot be generated by any plausible variety of domain restriction.

'All' and 'every' as quantity superlatives

Recent literature has pointed out similarities in the interpretation and distribution of 'most' and 'all' (Matthewson 2001, Crnic 2010). This literature takes both to be quantifiers. However, other literature analyzes the meaning of 'most' as the regular composition of 'much' (as a degree modifier) and the superlative morpheme '-st' (Hackl 2009). But if 'most' is a superlative and 'all' is a quantifier, any similarities are unexpected. In this paper, I reconcile these views by analyzing 'all' as a superlative term 'most'. Further, I claim that 'every' is a type-lifted derivative of 'all'. Similarities and differences between 'most', 'all' and 'every' emerge from this analysis.

Universal quantification as degree modification in Arabic

This paper demonstrates similarities between the universal quantifier kull ‘every/all’ and superlatives of quality and quantity in Standard Arabic. These similarities point to an analysis of kull as a kind of superlative. An analysis is developed that characterizes the meaning of kull as a minor variation on the meaning of the superlative morpheme that occurs in quality and quantity superlatives. The difference between kull’s strongly distributive meaning analogous to every and its weakly distributive meaning analogous to all is argued to be the result of a type-shifting mechanism. This analysis teases apart the syntactic and semantic components of the three construction types examined here and identifies the uniformity that runs through them.

Addressing the 'two interface' problem: Comparatives and superlatives

How much meaning can a morpheme have? Syntactic and morphological analyses generally underdetermine when distinctions in meaning between two forms are due to (i) the presence of an additional syntactic head or to (ii) different information coded on the same head. Surveying patterns across hundreds of languages, Bobaljik (2012) hypothesizes that superlative forms universally consist of a comparative morpheme plus an additional superlative morpheme, e.g., tallest is underlyingly [ SUP [ CMPR [ TALL ] ] ]. Bobaljik’s hypothesis includes, in part, a speculative proposal for a universal limit on the semantic complexity of morphemes. We offer a concrete basis for this proposal, the ‘No Containment Condition’ (NCC). The NCC is a constraint on grammars such that they cannot contain a certain semantic representation for a unitary head, if that representation can be constructed out of the semantic representations of two heads. Illustrating the proposal, we take Bobaljik’s analysis of forms like tallest further, into [ [ [ CMPR SUP ] MUCH ] TALL ]. Based in semantic analysis, our suggestion introduces Bresnan’s (1973) classical analysis of comparatives into the decomposition of superlatives.

Superlatives in Syrian Arabic

This paper describes superlative constructions in contemporary Syrian (Levantine) Arabic. These have the revealing property that the superlative morpheme may be linearly separated from the term that provides the degree scale it makes reference to. This displacement is syntactically constrained, lending support to theories that postulated movement in the derivation of superlative constructions. The data reported here also document a tight correlation of scopal options for the superlative in Arabic and English, indicating that the languages are uniform at LF, while the surface distribution of the superlative morpheme is wider in Arabic than in English. The remarkable convergence of a variety of interpretational nuances between these two unrelated languages suggests that these uniformities can be traced to Universal Grammar.

Relative readings of superlatives: Scope or focus?

I provide an analysis of the relative readings of superlatives on which the superlative morpheme -est is more constrained at LF than previously argued, yet the range of superlative readings available cross-linguistically is still accounted for. I argue that -est scopes outside the superlative DP only when necessary. I also provide empirical arguments that the focus structure of the sentence must be included in the LF representation of relative readings. In English, where -est only scopes DP-internally, we correctly predict the optionality of focus for relative readings. In Polish, where -est can also scope DP-externally, focus can be obligatory to disambiguate between the different LFs.

A superlative argument for a minimal theory of definiteness

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L';">This paper concerns the interpretation of the definite article with superlatives on a relative interpretation. Previous work has suggested that definite superlative noun phrases like </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L'; font-style: italic;">the fewest letters </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L';">in </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L'; font-style: italic;">Gloria received the fewest letters </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L';">(relative superlative DPs) are semantically indefinite. This paper argues that such DPs are </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L'; font-style: italic;">definite </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L';">(presupposing uniqueness) but not </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L'; font-style: italic;">determinate </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L';">(denoting an individual). We provide new evidence that they are not determinate, and undertake a critical review of the evidence that has previously been used to argue for their indefiniteness, arguing that it is consistent with the hypothesis that they are definite. We argue furthermore that a movement analysis of relative superlatives is not consistent with a treatment of the determiner as definite. We therefore offer an analysis of relative superlative DPs on which they are definite but indeterminate, and the superlative morpheme is interpreted </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L'; font-style: italic;">in situ</span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L';">. </span></p></div></div></div>

Infinitival Superlatives: English vs. Modern Hebrew

This paper investigates some semantic and syntactic properties of infinitival relative clauses in superlative expressions (“infinitival superlatives”). In the course of this investigation, more general theoretical issues pertaining to the syntax and semantics of relative clauses in general are addressed, as well as the semantics of superlatives and of tense. The semantics of infinitival superlatives is accounted for by the assumption that the superlative morpheme takes an event argument bound by the matrix tense. It is also observed that not all languages have infinitival superlatives, and that not all the languages that have them admit them in the same constructions. It is proposed that these cross-linguistic differences are due to a difference in the syntactic status of the superlative morpheme.

Superlatives, NPIs and Most

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.

Modal Superlatives And 3-Place Vs. 2-Place -Est

Superlative sentences with modal modifiers like possible give rise to the so-called ‘modal superlative reading’ (Larson 2000, Pancheva 2005). The present paper uses this reading to investigate an open issue in degree constructions: whereas two different lexical entries have been argued to exist for the comparative morpheme -er (3-place and 2-place), it is not clear whether two entries are needed for the superlative morpheme -est. The paper argues that, with 3-place -est, otherwise unmotivated syntactic material would to have to be postulated and that, even with this material, not all modal superlative examples would be assigned correct truth conditions. In contrast, 2-place -est can generate the modal superlative reading in all the cases, as shown in Romero (to appear, under review). Modal superlative sentences, thus, provide evidence that 2-place -est is needed in the grammar.

The scope of -est: evidence from Japanese

It has long been observed that the superlative construction, exemplified by John climbed the highest mountain, has two readings. On the absolute reading, the heights of the relevant mountains in a relevant context are compared; on the comparative reading, relevant climbers’ achievements of mountain climbing are compared (Szabolcsi, Comparative superlatives, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 1986). Two theories have been proposed regarding this ambiguity. One theory holds that it results from movement of the superlative morpheme -est (movement theory) (Heim, Association with focus, Doctoral Dissertation, 1985, Notes on superlatives, 1999; Szabolcsi 1986).The other theory holds that the ambiguity is derived by assignment of different values to the context variable C, keeping a single LF structure where -est stays in situ (in-situ theory) (Farkas and Kiss, Nat Lang Linguist Theory 18:417–455, 2000; Sharvit and Stateva, Linguist Philos 25:453–504, 2002). As is pointed out by Heim (1999), a choice between these theories is hard to make based solely on English. Through an investigation of Japanese superlative constructions, this paper argues that, in Japanese at least, a movement theory is required.

Definite and Nondefinite Superlatives and NPI Licensing

Abstract. We observe that superlative noun phrases are often not definite and may be headed by an indefinite determiner and other determiners. We attribute this fact to the semantics of the superlative morpheme which creates a (not necessarily singleton) set of individuals. A welcome prediction made by this proposal is that negative polarity items (NPIs) are licensed in the postnominal position only when the determiner that precedes the superlative morpheme is definite, because only then does the superlative morpheme have the semantic property required for NPI licensing—namely, Strawson Downward Entailingness. We explore some semantic and syntactic consequences of the proposal.