Decomposition of Comparative and Superlative Quantificational NPs at the Syntax/Semantics Interface

Description

Nominal expressions in natural language cannot only be used to refer to particular entities, but also to state the quantity of a set (e.g. 'all students', 'most professors'). How these quantificational noun phrases (Q-NPs) come to mean what they intuitively mean is one of the central concerns of natural language semantics. According to the standard approach represented by Generalized Quantifier Theory, quantificational noun phrases consist of a determiner ('all', 'most') and a noun. It is assumed that the essential semantic contribution is made by the determiner, where determiners are taken as unanalysed basic units. In recent years, however, there has been a growing body of evidence indicating that this approach is too simple and cannot account for the semantic contribution of Q-NPs in its full generality. Instead, a more insightfull analysis of Q-NPs is needed, which takes their internal morphosyntactic make-up into account and derives their meaning compositionally from the meaning of the parts involved. As an example, the meaning of 'fewer than ten' should be derived from the combination of the meaning of the parts it consists of, i.e. 'few', the comparative '-er than' and the numeral 'ten'. The aim of this project is to further develop and bolster the compositional approach to the semantics of Q-NPs. To this end, we investigate whether and how the meaning of Q-NPs involving comparative or superlative morphology ('more/fewer than n N', 'most N', 'at least/most n N') can be reduced to the semantics of comparatives and superlatives that have been proposed for the adjectival domain.

Project Members