Superlative Minimizers as Weak Definites

• Published in: Isogloss Vol. 10; no. 3
• Main Author: Ulises Delgado Díaz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 01-07-2024
• Subjects: definiteness; quantity-superlatives; superlative minimizers; superlatives; weak definites
• ISSN: 2385-4138
• DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.347

This paper deals with a hitherto little studied type of superlative, so-called ‘superlative minimizers’, which in Spanish take the form el más mínimo N ‘the slightest N’. Several tests show that these superlatives are non-specific or non-referential, despite their necessarily definite shape. The semantic properties of these expressions cannot be accounted for using the usual tools in theories on definiteness or quantity superlatives. The aim of this work is to provide a compositional analysis that explains several properties of these superlatives, particularly their non-specific nature and restrictions on the type of noun they admit. Assuming a kind-based semantics for nouns and a state-based theory on gradability, I propose that superlative minimizers express uniqueness over state-kinds, thus giving rise to a non-specific meaning of the DP and a quantity meaning, since state-kinds are scalar-ordered in the extensional domain of nouns. As a consequence, this work straddles two lines of research: on the one hand, it broadens our knowledge on quantity superlatives (cf. Hackl 2009, Solt 2012, a.o.) with a new type subject to previously unstudied characteristics; on the other, SMs are a type of the much-studied weak definites (cf. Aguilar-Guevara & Zwarts 2010, Abbott 2014, a.o.).