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Quantity Superlatives in Germanic, or 'Life on the Fault Line Between Adjective and Determiner'
- Source :
- Journal of Germanic Linguistics. 31:109-200
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2019.
-
Abstract
- This paper concerns the superlative forms of the wordsmany,much,few, andlittle, and their equivalents in German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dalecarlian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It demon-strates that every possible relationship between definiteness marking and interpretation is attested. It also demonstrates that different kinds of agreement mismatches are found under relative and proportional readings. One consistent pattern is that under a relative interpretation, quantity superlatives with adverbial morphology show neuter singular agreement even if the target noun is plural. In contrast, under a proportional interpretation, quantity superlatives always agree in number. This evidence is taken to show that quantity superlatives are not structurally analogous to quality superlatives such astalleston either a relative or a proportional reading; however, depending on their interpretation, quantity superlatives depart from a plain attributive structure in different ways. On relative readings, they can have a structure akin to that of pseudo-partitives (as intwo liters of milk), while on proportional readings, they tend to have a quantificational structure, sometimes involving a true partitive (as insome of the children). Furthermore, I suggest that the agreement features of a quantity superlative depend on the domain from which the target is drawn (the Target-Domain Hypothesis).
- Subjects :
- 050101 languages & linguistics
Linguistics and Language
Literature and Literary Theory
05 social sciences
06 humanities and the arts
0603 philosophy, ethics and religion
Attributive
Language and Linguistics
language.human_language
Linguistics
Partitive
Faroese
Definiteness
060302 philosophy
language
Determiner
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Adjective
Superlative
Plural
Mathematics
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14753014 and 14705427
- Volume :
- 31
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Journal of Germanic Linguistics
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........543e4ca62660aa1abdb06932217cb9ef