Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire 
| Titre | The Illusion of Predicative Superlatives |
| Conférencier | Peter Hallman (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence) |
| Date | mardi 19 octobre 2021 |
| Heure | 12h15 |
| Salle | L208 (Bâtiment Candolle) |
| Description | Matushansky (2008) claims that superlative adjectives are necessarily attributive, that is, they only combine with a noun, and do not occur predicatively on their own. She treats apparent cases of predicate superlatives in English as exceptions. Loccioni (2018) discusses apparent cases of predicate superlatives in Romance and argues that they undermine Matushansky's claim. Here, I offer support for Matushansky's proposal, discussing evidence from Arabic and German indicating that 1) apparent predicate superlatives are actually adverbial, and 2) even there, they combine with a noun, covert in German but overt in Arabic. I claim that this analysis captures apparent exceptions in English and Romance as well.
Matushansky, Ora (2008) On the attributive nature of superlatives. Syntax 11:26-90. Loccioni, Nicoletta (2018) Getting ‘the most’ out of Romance, Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA. |
| Document(s) joint(s) |
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