LLF – Bât. ODG – 5e étage – Salle du conseil (533)
Carmen Sorin (LLF)
Comparatives, Superlatives and Definiteness in Romance
French and Italian differ as to whether superlative meanings of adverbs and postnominal adjectives require or ban a definite article (notated THE) preceding the comparative morpheme plus (notated ER). According to Loccioni (2018) this crosslinguistic difference is not structural: Italian comparatives would have a null/covert D(eterminer)) corresponding to THE in French. I will propose instead that whereas French has a dedicated superlative complex marker [THE ER], Italian has a ‘bare’ ER that gets superlative meaning via a dependency rel. with [D°THE]. The dependency relation will be implemented in terms of Upward Agree (Zeijlstra 2004). The semantic analysis will make use of semantically complex Quantifiers (Keenan 1987).