Superlatives and Definiteness in Albanian

Abstract

Since Szabolcsi (1986), it has been known that adjectival superlatives are ambiguousbetween an absolute superlative reading and a relative superlative reading: 1) Mary read the longest book. a. Mary read the longest book out of all the books (in the library). b. Mary read a book that is longer than all the books read by other students. According to the absolute superlative reading in (1a), we compare elements of a (contextually restricted) set of books. A DP1 that embeds an absolute superlative refers to the member of this set which is at the top of the scale introduced by the adjective, in this case the scale of length. According to the relative superlative reading in (1b), on the other hand, the comparison crucially involves not only books but also another element in the sentence (called the “correlate”), in this case Mary: the length of the book read by Mary is compared to the lengths of the books read by other people. Let us stress that the meaning of an absolute superlative is computed DP internally, without taking into account the rest of the sentence. The meaning of the sentence in (1) is obtained by compositionally combining the meaning of the absolute superlative DP with the rest of the clause, which results in conveying that Mary read the entity denoted by the superlative DP, i.e., the book that is the longest out of a contextually restricted set of books, e.g., the books of a given library mentioned or implicit in the context. Relative superlative readings, on the other hand, need to take into account the correlate, which is outside the superlative DP. The main goal of this paper is to assign a syntactic representation to Albanian superlative DPs by choosing between two structural representations that are known tocorrespond to the superficially identical forms found across Romance language. The main issue will be to decide on whether the definite article sits in the D° position (as in Italian or Spanish, see Loccioni (2018) or instead is part of a superlative DegP constituent (as in Romanian, see Cornilescu and Giurgea (2013), as well as in some of the Frenchsuperlative DPs, see Dobrovie-Sorin (this volume).