Quantity superlatives in Germanic, or, ‘Life on the fault line between adjective and determiner'

This paper concerns the superlative forms of the words many, much, few, and little, and their equivalents in other Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dalecarlian, Icelandic, and Faroese). It demonstrates that every possible relationship between definiteness and interpretation is attested. It also demonstrates that agreement mismatches are found with relative readings and with proportional readings, but different kinds of agreement mismatches in each case. One consistent pattern is that a quantity superlative with adverbial morphology and neuter singular agreement features is used with relative superlatives. On the other hand, quantity superlatives with proportional readings always agree in number. I conclude that quantity superlatives are not structurally analogous to quality superlatives on either relative or proportional readings, but they depart from a plain attributive structure in different ways. On relative readings they can be akin to pseudopartitives (as in a cup of tea), while proportional readings are more closely related to partitives (as in a piece of the cake). More specifically, I suggest that the agreement features of a superlative exhibits depend on the domain from which the target is drawn (the target-domain hypothesis). When the target is a degree, as it is with adverbial superlatives and certain relative superlatives, default neuter singular emerges. Definiteness there is driven by the same process that drives definiteness with adverbial superlatives. With proportional readings, the target argument of the superlative is a subpart or subset of the domain indicated by the substance noun, hence number agreement. Subtle aspects of how the comparison class and the superlative marker are construed determine definiteness for proportional readings.http://eecoppock.info/germanic.pdfAccepted manuscrip

'Most' vs. 'the most' in languages where 'the more' means 'most'

This paper focuses on 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, superlatives are not always definite-marked in these languages, and the distribution of definiteness-marking varies from language to language. To account for the cross-linguistic variation, we iden- tify conflicting pressures that all of the languages in consideration may be subject to, and suggest that different languages prioritize differently in the resolution of these conflicts. What these languages have in common, we suggest, is a mechanism of Definite Null Instantiation for the degree-type standard argument of the comparative. Among the parameters along which languages are proposed to differ is the relative importance of marking uniqueness vs. avoiding determiners with predicates of entities that are not individuals.http://eecoppock.info/CoppockStrand-DAL.pdfhttp://eecoppock.info/CoppockStrand-DAL.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Definiteness and determinacy

This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Definiteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a (weak) uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate (and thus denote an individual) or indeterminate (functioning as an existential quantifier). The latter option is observed in examples like ‘Anna didn’t give the only invited talk at the conference’, which, on its indeterminate reading, implies that there is nothing in the extension of ‘only invited talk at the conference’. The paper also offers a resolution of the issue of whether possessives are inherently indefinite or definite, suggesting that, like indefinites, they do not mark definiteness lexically, but like definites, they typically yield determinate readings due to a general preference for the shifting operation that produces them.We thank Dag Haug, Reinhard Muskens, Luca Crnic, Cleo Condoravdi, Lucas Champollion, Stanley Peters, Roger Levy, Craige Roberts, Bert LeBruyn, Robin Cooper, Hans Kamp, Sebastian Lobner, Francois Recanati, Dan Giberman, Benjamin Schnieder, Rajka Smiljanic, Ede Zimmerman, as well as audiences at SALT 22 in Chicago, IATL 29 in Jerusalem, Going Heim in Connecticut, the Workshop on Bare Nominals and Non-Standard Definites in Utrecht, the University of Cambridge, the University of Gothenburg, the University of Konstanz, New York University, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Beaver was supported by NSF grants BCS-0952862 and BCS-1452663. Coppock was supported by Swedish Research Council project 2009-1569 and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond's Pro Futura Scientia program, administered through the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. (BCS-0952862 - NSF; BCS-1452663 - NSF; 2009-1569 - Swedish Research Council; Riksbankens Jubileumsfond's Pro Futura Scientia program

It's not what you expected! The surprising nature of cleft alternatives in French and English

While much prior literature on the meaning of clefts—such as the English form “it is X who Z-ed”—concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (“nobody/nothing other than X Z”), we report on experiments examining the role of the doxastic status of alternatives on the naturalness of c'est-clefts in French and it-clefts in English. Specifically, we study the hypothesis that clefts indicate a conflict with a doxastic commitment held by some discourse participant. Results from naturalness tasks suggest that clefts are improved by a property we term “contrariness” (along the lines of Zimmermann, 2008). This property has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.Published versio

Superlative modifiers as modified superlatives

The superlative modifiers at least and at most are quite famous, but their cousins at best, at the latest, at the highest, etc., are less well-known. This paper is devoted to the entire family. New data is presented illustrating the productivity of the pattern, identifying a generalization delimiting it, and showing that the cousins, too, have the pragmatic effects that have attracted so much attention to at least and at most. To capture the productivity, I present a new decomposition of at least into recombinable parts. Most notable is the at-component (silent in some languages), which takes advantage of the comparison class argument of the superlative to produce the set of possibilities involved in the ignorance implicatures that superlative modifiers are known for. A side-effect is a new view on gradable predicates, accounting for uses like 88 degrees is too hot. Published versio

Challenge Problems for a Theory of Degree Multiplication (with partial answer key)

This paper offers a theory of degree multiplication in natural language semantics. Motivation for the development such a theory comes from proportional readings of quantity words and rate expressions such as miles per hour. After laying out a set of ‘challenge problems’ that any good theory of degree multiplication should be able to handle, I set about solving them, borrowing mathematical tools from quantity calculus. These algebraic foundations are integrated into a compositional Montagovian framework, yielding a system that can solve, or partially solve, some of the problems