Speaker: Sabine Iatridou (MIT)
Title: Superlatives meet Definiteness in Bulgarian and Greek
Time: Thursday, December 11, 12:30pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: The aim of this paper (joint work with Artemis Alexiadou and Roumyana Pancheva) is to enrich the debate on the nature of absolute and relative readings of superlatives with data from Bulgarian and Greek and explore possible conclusions from them. We investigate three phenomena exhibited by definite DPs: polydefiniteness, clitic doubling, and clitic left dislocation, and show that the first two preclude relative readings, while the latter allows relative readings in contexts of contrastive topicalization. This leads us to conclude that the absolute-relative distinction in superlatives is a case of a genuine semantic ambiguity, with definiteness playing a central role, but also that there is an important role for context. Our findings also reveal similarities and differences among clitic doubling, clitic left dislocation, and polydefiniteness, in both Bulgarian and Greek.