Modal Superlatives And 3-Place Vs. 2-Place -Est

Superlative sentences with modal modifiers like possible give rise to the so-called 'modal superlative reading' (Larson 2000, Schwarz 2005). The present paper uses this reading to investigate an open issue in degree constructions: whereas two different lexical entries have been argued to exist for the comparative morpheme -er (3-place and 2-place), it is not clear whether two entries are needed for the superlative morpheme -est. The paper argues that, with 3-place –est, otherwise unmotivated syntactic material would to have to be postulated and that, even with this material, not all modal superlative examples would be assigned correct truth conditions. In contrast, 2-place -est can generate the modal superlative reading in all the cases, as shown in Romero (to appear, under review). Modal superlative sentences, thus, provide evidence that 2-place –est is needed in the grammar. References Beck, S. & Rullmann, H. 1996. ‘Degree Questions, Maximal Informativeness, and Exhaustivity’. In P. Dekker & M. Stokhof (eds.) ‘Proceedings of the Tenth Amsterdam Colloquium’, 73–92. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. Bhatt, R. & Takahashi, S. 2008. ‘When to reduce and when not to: crosslinguistic variation in phrasal comparatives.’ Paper presented at GLOW XXXI. Büring, D. 2007. ‘Comparative Sandwichology’. In R. Colavin, K. Cooke, K. Davidson, S. Fukuda & A. Del Guidice (eds.) ‘Proceedings of WECOL 2007’, 17–28. University of California, San Diego. Corver, N. 1997. ‘Much-support as last resort’. Linguistic Inquiry 21: 119–164. Fiengo, R. & May, R. 1994. Indices and Identity. MIT Press. Grosu, A. & Landman, F. 1998. ‘Strange Relatives of the Third Kind’. Natural Language Semantics 6: 125–170. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1008268401837 Hackl, M. 2000. Comparative Quantifiers. Ph.D. thesis, MIT. Hackl, M. 2009. ‘On the Grammar and Processing of Proportional Quantifiers: Most versus More Than Half’. Natural Language Semantics 17: 63–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9039-x Heim, I. 1985. ‘Notes on comparatives and related matters’. U. Texas at Austin lecture notes. Heim, I. 1987. ‘Where does the definiteness restriction apply? Evidence from the definiteness of variables’. In E. Reuland & A. ter Meulen (eds.) ‘The Linguistic Representation of (In)definiteness’, 21–42. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Heim, I. 1999. ‘Notes on Superlatives’. MIT lecture notes. Heim, I. 2000. ‘Degree Operators and Scope’. In B. Jackson & T. Matthews (eds.) ‘Proceedings of SALT X’, 40–64. Cornell NY: CLC Publications. Heim, I. 2006. ‘Little’. In Proceedings