Semantics Research Group Meeting, November 12, 2010

[Japanese | English]

Time:
4:30pm, November 12, 2010
Place:
National Institute of Informatics (National Center of Sciences Bldg.),
19th floor, Presentation Room (1904)
Speaker:
Richard Zuber, CNRS
Title:
On the semantics and expressive power of superlatives
Abstract:

I will show that superlative constructions essentially, in particular those giving rise to relative readings of superlatives (Szabolcsi, A. (1986) Comparative supelatives, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, pp. 245-266), extend the expressive power of NLs since one of the readings of ambiguous superlatives, whether numeric or non-numeric, is interpreted by functions from relations to sets which are not just case extensions of type <1> quantifiers used to interpret "ordinary" noun phrases. In that sense superlatives with relative readings are not NPs.

An unpublished paper on which the talk is based is available.

Semantics Research Group

Last modified: 2010-10-22 09:24:16 JST