Speaker: Thomas Truong (MIT)
Title: Plural superlatives and cumulativity
Time: Wednesday, November 5th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk I will present some ongoing work on the interactions between plurals and superlatives.
To do so, I examine a unique reading of sentences containing plurals and superlatives.
(1) Rafa climbed each of the tallest mountains that his students climbed.
Under one reading of (1), the truth conditions require us to look at each of the students, check which mountains each student climbed, and then take the tallest mountain climbed for each of the students.
I will break down this construction. I claim that this reading is generated as a case of cumulative readings, where the superlative operator is in the scope of the cumulativity operator.
I show that if we assume the ** operator (Krifka 1986, Sternefeld 1998, Beck and Sauerland 2000) to derive cumulativity along with an account of superlatives following Heim (1999), covert movement outside of a relative clause seems to be necessary to derive the correct LF for the relevant interpretation of sentence (1).