Negative Polarity Items in Definite Superlatives

Abstract

Ordinary superlative descriptions are well-known to provide safe harbor to negative polarity items (NPIs), as in the longest book anyone read. What is less well-known is that relative superlative descriptions also sometimes host NPIs, as in the loudest that anyone sang. We observe that this latter pattern is more general than has been previously described. In fact, relative superlatives can license NPIs outside of their own descriptions. On the one hand, we argue that this provides evidence that the superlative adjectives take sentential rather than nominal scope. But on the other, following insights in Howard 2014, we argue that traditional semantic accounts of scope-taking superlatives do not present the right monotonicity profile to account for the NPIs either. A recent, dynamic take on superlative semantics (Bumford 2017) is shown to do better.

57 | 2023

“…And again, superlatives behave on a par with indefinites: 1 This reading is referred to as 'comparative' in Szabolcsi (1986), Heim (1999), Krasikova (2012), a.o. We use the term 'relative', which first appeared in the last part of Heim's (1999) seminal paper and is predominant in recent work (see, among others, Pancheva, Tomaszewicz 2012;Coppock, Beaver 2014;Bumford, Sharvit 2022). We avoid the term 'comparative' because all superlatives involve comparison and, moreover, this term could inappropriately be understood as referring to those superlatives that are morphosyntactically built on comparatives (Romance languages, Arabic, Celtic, among others).…”

“…However, the idea of a determiner+superlative complex comes close to our proposal, in which the superlative acts as the determiner of the DP. In Bumford and Sharvit (2022), the idea that the superlative and the determiner may raise together as a complex quantifier is mentioned as a possibility (but not formally implemented).…”