Language and Linguistics news and events

Multiple grammars: Systemic variation across monolingual and bilingual systems

With the advent of a better understanding of grammatical architecture as well as the development of articulated models of language structure, it has become apparent that the same surface phenomenon may have different underlying representations.

Implicit comparison and the typology of superlatives

Natural languages adopt at least four distinct morpho-syntactic strategies in the expression of superlative meaning (see also Bobaljik 2012; Gorshenin 2012; Coppock 2016), including (i) a dedicated morpheme, (ii) a comparative paraphrase, (iii) the use of an intensifier, and (iv) the use of the Positive form.