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theses

This dissertation focuses on two intriguing puzzles posed by superlative modifiers (SMs) like English at least/ at most: the ambiguity puzzle and the morpho-semantic puzzle. The ambiguity puzzle concerns the fact that cross-linguistically, SMs tend to demonstrate an ambiguity between an epistemic reading (EPI) conveying speaker ignorance and a concessive reading (CON) conveying speaker concession. The morpho-semantic puzzle concerns the fact that cross-linguistically, SMs in general involve degree words and quantity adjectives in their morphology.
The central proposal of this dissertation is two-fold. First, it is proposed that the EPI-CON ambiguity results from one unified semantic entry combining with different pragmatic factors such as informativity and evaluativity. That is, the two meanings can be seen as pragmatic variants in natural language. Second, the proposed semantics of SMs can be further decomposed into three pieces: a quantity adjective (Q-adjective), a superlative component and an existential operator E-OP. In particular, Q-adjectives play a crucial role of encoding a measure function mapping the set of focus alternatives to their corresponding positions ordered along a contextually-given scale. Moreover, a superlative construction is contained in the internal structure of SMs. The superlative construction, expressing a comparison relation between the prejacent and its alternatives along certain contextually-given dimension, not only instantiates the scalar component of a focus particle like SMs but also introduces the bounding property of SMs. Specifically, the non-strict comparison relation of SMs is derived from the focus presuppositions by the squiggle operator ~ (obtaining the prejacent) and the contribution of the superlative (obtaining the higher/ lower alternatives). Finally, E-OP makes an existential statement over a domain that is always non-singleton: a set consisting of the prejacent and its higher/ lower alternatives.
This dissertation captures a wide range of linguistic facts: (a) why the EPI-CON ambiguity is so pervasive across natural languages and generally shown by one single lexical item (particularly by SMs); (b) why multiple lexical items in one single language, as in Chinese, may demonstrate the ambiguity; (c) why the two meanings share three common properties: focus-sensitivity, the compatibility with various scales and two scalar effects (the bottom-of-the-scale effect and the top-of-the-scale effect); (d) why the availability of the concessive meaning is restricted by the syntactic position of SMs in some languages, as in English and Chinese; (e) why and how SMs are parallel with disjunctions and epistemic indefinites in natural language; (f) why the same Chinese expressions zui-duo and zui-shao, morphologically consisting of a quantity adjective duo ‘much’/ shao ‘little’ and the superlative morpheme zui, are used as both superlative modifiers and quantity superlatives; (g) why Q-adjectives seem to be the common core in the morphological makeup of SMs across languages.

ETD_9249

doi:10.7282/T3FX7F3T

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Yi-Hsun Chen

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.