Proportional implies relative: a typological universal
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2017-06-13
DOI
Authors
Coppock, Elizabeth
Bogal-Allbritten, Elizabeth
Nouri-Hosseini, Golsa
Stiefeling, Saskia
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
Elizabeth Coppock, Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten, Golsa Nouri-Hosseini, Saskia Stiefeling. 2017. "Proportional implies relative: A typological universal." Linguistic Society of America. 2017-01-05 - 2017-01-08.
Abstract
We give evidence from a geographically, genetically, and typologically diverse set of languages (drawn from 26 different language families and every continent) for the following typological universal: Regardless of the morphosyntactic strategy used by a language to form
superlatives, if superlative morphosyntax can be applied to ‘much’ or ‘many’, then the result can be used to express a relative reading (as in Hillary has visited the most continents (out of everyone)) but not necessarily a proportional reading (as in Hillary has visited most of the continents). Thus, no language deploys the regular superlative of ‘much’/‘many’ for the proportional but not the relative reading. We also give a rough estimate of how rare proportional readings for quantity superlatives are: about 10%. Nevertheless, we show that proportional readings arise with a diverse set of strategies for forming superlatives.