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Share Paper 3557

When Superlative Modifiers and Quality Superlatives Are Twins
Yi-Hsun Chen
116-126 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Most analyses of superlative modifiers (SMs) in the literature exclusively focus on two English expressions at least and at most, and do not incorporate the semantic contribution of their morphology. However, the abundant cross-linguistic facts provide strong evidence that the morphology of SMs in natural language cannot simply be ignored or regarded as a linguistic coincidence. This paper fills the gap in the previous studies of SMs by looking into SMs formed with quality adjectives in Mandarin Chinese and presents a decompositional analysis of Mandarin SMs as a modified superlative. It is shown 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 enriches the linguistic inventory of this research agenda by including SMs, a class of scalar focus adverbs but bearing overt degree morphology and gradable adjectives.

Published in

Proceedings of the 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Rachel Soo, Una Y. Chow, and Sander Nederveen
Table of contents
Printed edition: $425.00