Linguistics Seminar Talk - Chris Kennedy

Title:  Notes on comparatives and superlatives and related matters

Abstract 

Suppose that Kim, Pat and Lee are runners.  The sentence in (1) can be used to say at least three truth-conditionally distinct things, paraphrased in (1a)-(1c):

(1) Kim wants to run the fastest marathon.

a. Kim wants to run a marathon faster than 2:00:35, the current world record.

b. Kim wants to run a marathon faster than Pat and Lee.

c. The time Kim wants to run is faster than the times Pat and Lee want to run.

The (1a) and (1b) readings correspond to the so-called “absolute” and “relative” interpretations of superlatives, respectively; the (1c) reading is a special case of the latter, sometimes referred to as the “upstairs de dicto” reading.  Heim (1999) makes a compelling argument that upstairs de dicto readings demand an analysis of the absolute/relative ambiguity in terms of the scope-taking properties of superlatives.  Heim's analysis assumes that superlatives are bimorphemic, with a superlative morpheme composing directly with an adjectival root.  This assumption, however, is in conflict with Bobaljik’s (2012) compelling arguments that superlatives are in fact trimorphemic, built out of a comparative and a root, a view that has come to be referred to as the Containment Hypothesis.  A simple application of Heim’s semantics to a structure compatible with the Containment Hypothesis cannot derive upstairs de dicto readings, and thus far no one has provided an alternative scopal analysis that can do so.  In this talk, I provide such an analysis, which builds crucially on previous work arguing that comparative semantics can be introduced both by comparative morphology and by standard-marking morphology (Alrenga, Kennedy and Merchant 2012, Schwarzschild 2020, Kennedy to appear). The analysis may also provide the basis for an explanation of why the Containment Hypothesis should hold in the first place.

Heim, Irene. 1999. “Notes on Superlatives.” Unpublished ms., MIT.

Bobaljik, Jonathan. 2012. Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words. MIT Press.

Schwarzschild, Roger. 2020. "From Possible Individuals to Scalar Segments.” In Hallman, Peter (ed.) Interactions of Degree and Quantification, Brill.

Alrenga, Peter, Christopher Kennedy and Jason Merchant. 2012. “A New Standard of Comparison.” In Arnett, Nathan and Ryan Bennet (eds.), Proceedings of 30th West Coast Conference on Linguistics. Cascadilla Press.

Kennedy, Christopher. To appear. “Points of Comparison.” In Cavirani, Edoardo and Anastasiia Vynshevksa (eds.), Generative Perspecrtives on Degrees. De Gruyter.