Addressing the “two interface” problem: Comparatives and superlatives

Abstract

How much meaning can a morpheme have? Syntactic and morphological analyses are generally underdetermined with regard to whether meaning differences between two forms are because of (i) the presence of an additional syntactic head or (ii) one single head that can have different semantic interpretations. Surveying patterns across hundreds of languages, Bobaljik ( 2012) hypothesizes that superlative forms universally consist of a comparative morpheme plus an additional superlative morpheme: tallest is underlyingly [ SUP [ CMPR [ TALL ] ] ]. Bobaljik’s hypothesis includes, in part, a speculative proposal for a universal limit on the semantic complexity of morphemes. We offer a concrete basis for this proposal, the “No Containment Condition” (NCC). The NCC is a constraint on grammars such that they cannot contain a semantic representation for a unitary head, if that representation can be constructed out of the semantic representations of two heads. Illustrating the proposal, we take Bobaljik’s analysis of forms like tallest further, into [ [ [ CMPR SUP ] MUCH ] TALL ]. Based in semantic analysis, our suggestion introduces Bresnan’s (1973) classical analysis of comparatives into the decomposition of superlatives.