32.3303, Confs: General Linguistics, Linguistic Theories, Semantics/Romania

Thu Oct 21 02:48:48 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3303. Wed Oct 20 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3303, Confs: General Linguistics, Linguistic Theories, Semantics/Romania

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Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2021 22:43:20
From: Lucia Tovena [tovena at linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr]
Subject: Superlatives and Definiteness

Superlatives and Definiteness 
Short Title: SuperDef 

Date: 24-Aug-2022 - 27-Aug-2022 
Location: Bucharest, Romania 
Contact: Ion Giurgea 
Contact Email: giurgeaion at yahoo.com 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Semantics 

Meeting Description: 

The use of the definite articles with ‘relative’ superlatives is a much
studied but still unsettled issue in formal linguistics (Szabolcsi 1986, Heim
1999, Farkas & É. Kiss 2000, Sharvit & Stateva 2002, Schwarz 2005, Krasikova
2012, Pancheva & Tomaszewicz 2012, Coppock & Beaver 2014). Other—less
addressed—issues concerning the interaction between superlatives and
definiteness are:
i) the construction of the superlative meanings by combining definiteness
marking and a comparative form. Romance languages, Albanian, Modern Greek,
some Austrian German varieties, Maltese, Neo-Aramaic, Livonian do not have a
dedicated morphological marker for the superlative (no counterpart of the
English -est or most) but instead convey superlative meanings by using
comparative markers associated with definiteness (see Bobaljik 2012:52). For
Romance languages, it has been shown that this morphological uniformity
corresponds to quite different syntactic configurations, depending on whether
the definite article is part of a superlative constituent as in French
postnominal superlatives and in Romanian (Croitor & Giurgea 2016,
Dobrovie-Sorin & Giurgea 2021), or realizes the determiner of the overall
nominal projection, as in Ibero-Romance and Italian (Loccioni 2018). On the
semantic side, attempts have been made of building superlative meanings based
on comparatives (see Dunbar & Wellwood 2016) but definiteness plays no part in
them.
ii) the restriction on the use of indefinite determiners with superlatives.
Such uses are only found in absolute superlatives which involve separate
orderings in each group of a plurality, e.g. This class has a best student
(Herdan & Sharvit 2006). 
iii) the semantics of predicative superlatives. Recently, it has been noticed
that predicative superlatives show interesting properties in languages that
mark superlatives by combining comparatives and definites (Loccioni 2018,
2019, Croitor & Giurgea 2016). 

We encourage contributions on these unsettled or understudied topics,
particularly on the comparative syntax of superlatives and the
syntax-semantics interface. Themes include: 

1. Crosslinguistic variation 
a. independent crosslinguistic differences that would correlate with the
difference regarding the distribution of the definite article in superlatives 
b. the situation in languages other than Romance that use definite article
plus comparatives (e.g. Arabic or Albanian)

2. Differences between adnominal and predicative superlatives

3. Modal superlatives (see Schwarz 2005, Romero 2013, Loccioni 2019)
a. syntax and semantic composition
b. adnominal vs predicate position

4. Compositional semantics
a. the semantics of superlatives in languages where the definite article is a
‘superlative marker’ directly attached to the adjective in the comparative
b. the semantics of superlatives in languages where the definite article is
the determiner of the nominal projection rather than a ‘superlative marker’.
Do we need to postulate a null counterpart of the superlative marker that
surfaces as a definite in Romanian and French?
c. the semantics of adnominal vs predicative superlatives

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3303	
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