Building superlatives from property concept expressions

Abstract

Although the relative versus absolute ambiguity in superlatives is well established, there is no consensus regarding how the comparison classes which gives rise to these ambiguities are determined. Two factors, the LF syntax of –est and focus, have been said to determine the comparison classes. In this paper, I provide novel data from Malayalam, a language without adjectives, which require both a movement theory of superlatives and focus to derive the readings.