Agenda

In French superlative adverbs and superlative postnominal adjectives are necessarily formed with a definite article (notated THE) preceding the comparative morpheme plus (notated ER), whereas in the Italian corresponding examples THE is banned. According to Loccioni (2018) this crosslinguistic difference is not structural: Italian comparatives would have a null/covert D(eterminer)) corresponding to THE in French. I will propose instead that whereas French has a dedicated superlative complex marker of the form [THE ER], Italian has a ‘bare’ ER that can get a superlative meaning in two different ways, depending on whether it occurs in the postnominal position or outside a DP (see adverbs and predicative adjectives). For the adnominal position I will propose that ER carries an uninterpretable feature that needs to enter Upward Agree (Zeijlstra’s 2004) with an interpretable feature on the [D°THE] that governs the head N (of a simple DP or of a DP embedding a relative). The semantic composition will make use of complex quantificational determiners. Regarding the analysis of superlatively interpreted comparative adverbs (as well as predicative comparative adjectives) I will only describe the data and suggest a line of inquiry.

Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin was born and lived in Bucarest until 1976 and in Paris ever since. She earned an MA in English from the University of Bucarest, a ‘Thèse de Doctorat de 3ème cycle’ (1979) and a ‘Thèse de Doctorat d’Etat’ (1987) from the University of Paris 7. Her dissertation was dedicated to several areas of the syntax of Romanian: clitic doubling, preposition marking of direct objects, passives. She has worked as a CNRS Researcher since 1988. She has run several cooperation research projects between  the CNRS and the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Romania. Her research bears on genitives and construct state, indefinites, plurals, genericity and kind-reference, quantification. Her most recent book, co-authored with Ion Giurgea: Majority Quantification and Quantity Superlatives. A Crosslinguistic Analysis of MOST, OUP 2020.