Focus association in superlatives and the semantics of -est

Abstract

I provide new evidence from Polish that two lexical entries for the superlative morpheme -est are needed in the grammar of a single language: 3-place -est on which individuals are compared and 2-place -est comparing sets of degrees, (Heim, 1999) (Romero, 2010). I argue that 2-place -est does not associate with focus, but is used in cases of explicit comparison between degrees, e.g. in the presence of a degree relative clause in Polish. I show that focus association with 3-place -est accounts for the range of superlative readings found cross-linguistically (Pancheva & Tomaszewicz, 2012).