Superlatives in Syrian Arabic

Abstract

This paper describes superlative constructions in contemporary Syrian (Levantine) Arabic. These have the revealing property that the superlative morpheme may be linearly separated from the term that provides the degree scale it makes reference to. This displacement is syntactically constrained, lending support to theories that postulated movement in the derivation of superlative constructions. The data reported here also document a tight correlation of scopal options for the superlative in Arabic and English, indicating that the languages are uniform at LF, while the surface distribution of the superlative morpheme is wider in Arabic than in English. The remarkable convergence of a variety of interpretational nuances between these two unrelated languages suggests that these uniformities can be traced to Universal Grammar.