Abstract
Sentences like Mary needs to make the fewest mistakes on the upcoming test have a ‘split scope’ reading roughly paraphrasable as ‘Mary exceeds all others in terms of how many mistakes she must not make’; that is, her situation is the most precarious. The structural approach to this phenomenon attributes to such sentences a logical form resembling this paraphrase, in which the superlative component of the meaning of fewest scopes above the modal need to and the negative component scopes below it. This paper investigates analogous structures in Syrian Arabic, a language in which superlatives may appear at a distance from their scalar associates in the surface order. The syntax of such expressions in Syrian Arabic, and the range of interpretations available to the various syntactic permutations found there points to two different sources for split scope readings. While some split scope readings are derived by syntactic splitting of fewest across a modal verb, others arise from a semantic ambiguity in the modal verb itself, rather than from a syntactic distinction in logical form.
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Notes
When the subject of comparison is non-human, ʃi ‘thing’ replaces wāħid(e), though particularly in rural dialects ʃi has generalized to humans as well.
The term ‘quantity superlative’ is due to Gawron (1995). Also following Gawron, I refer to the kind of superlative in (2)/(3), where the scalar associate of the superlative is a gradable adjective, as a ‘quality superlative’.
This opportunity is relatively unique. The only other language I am familiar with that allows superlatives to occur at a distance from their scalar associate is Japanese, as reported by Aihara (2009). But as Aihara also remarks, Japanese does not have a counterpart of least, meaning that correlations between the distribution of least and negation cannot be observed in that language, unlike in Arabic, as I show in detail below.
The idea here is that wāħid(e) is a kind of inflection that signals the subject of comparison by virtue of agreement. Consequently, it plays a role in determining the logical form of the sentence but does not contribute semantic content to that logical form.
Erlewine (2018) proposes that Mandarin does not have degree abstraction, but has gradable lexical items that combine with their degree argument last. As a result, degree quantifiers adjoin at a (short) distance from the associated gradable head, above other arguments, yet still within the head’s argument domain. This approach is unsuitable for Arabic, where degree dependencies are a great deal less restrictive, as many of the examples to follow show, and in particular are not clause bound, as example (i) in fn. 7 shows. For that reason, Arabic appears to have a degree predicate abstraction process at its disposal, unlike Mandarin.
In Hallman (2016), I make this same point in connection with (i). Consider a context in which Professor Fareed states that his student has memorized 400 verses of the Quran, Professor Rashid states that his student memorized 300 verses, and Professor Ahmad states that his student memorized 200 verses, but also (mistakenly) that this student memorized more verses than any other student.
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(i)
In the situation described above, (i) is judged false by native speakers, because Professor Ahmad said his student memorized 200 verses, and 200 is not more than the number of verses the other professors said their students memorized. But if aktar wāħid ‘most one’ were interpreted in the subordinate clause, where its scalar associate is found, it would constitute part of the description of what Professor Ahmad said. Then the sentence would express that Professor Ahmad said his student memorized more verses than any other student did. The sentence would be true on this reading, since Prof. Ahmad did in fact say that (mistakenly). The fact that the sentence is judged unequivocally false means that it has no true reading, and therefore that the adverbial superlative cannot reconstruct, which in turn militates against the idea that the adverbial superlative is base-generated lower than its surface position.
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(i)
The glottal stop in Syrian aʔall corresponds to a uvular stop [q] in Classical Arabic which is preserved in Omani. Also, in Omani negative mā has no alternative form.
This mechanism might take the form of a lambda abstractor with the same semantic type as negation itself, as illustrated in (i). Lowering will then be a result of lambda reduction, which would effectively put negation ‘back’ into the position it moved from (X in (i)).
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(i)
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(i)
My remarks here leave open the question of how the morphological fusion of accac ‘est’ with ʔalīl ‘few/little’ proceeds on this account, which could very well end up posing empirical problems. But I take the question of why only lāzim ‘must/need to’ allows an ‘at most’ upstairs de dicto reading for aʔall ‘least’ to be more significant.
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Acknowledgements
I extend my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers whose input substantially improved this work, to Rashid Al-Balushi for discussion of the Omani facts, and to the Syrian native speakers Mohammad Al-Kadamani, H. Al-Khaled, Samah Alouch, Bushra Al-Shalabi and Talal Al-Shlash, who provided the Syrian data reported here and spared no effort to ensure that I recorded it accurately. Any remaining errors are, accordingly, entirely my own.
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This research was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P30409-G30.
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Hallman, P. Scope splitting in Syrian Arabic. Nat Lang Semantics 30, 47–76 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-022-09188-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-022-09188-4