Definiteness and Number-Ambiguity in the Superlative Construction in Arabic
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Abstract
This paper highlights and accounts for some interesting properties of the superlative construction in Modern Standard Arabic that have not been addressed by previous research on Arabic. One property that is focused on in this paper is the interaction between number and definiteness in this construction. It is argued that the superlative construction behaves like a Construct State (CS), which is a nominal construction in Arabic that roughly corresponds to the English genitive construction. On a par with the head noun of the CS, the superlative adjective has nominal head properties and is the head of the construction. However, it is shown that the nature of the interaction between number and definiteness in the superlative construction is different from that in the CS, which results in number ambiguity in the superlative construction but not in the CS. To account for this difference, some modifications to the structure proposed for the CS are made. The first is that the modified DP in the superlative construction is base-generated in the complement position of the AP. The other is that the LF-movement of the modified DP to Spec-DP, which is responsible for the number ambiguity in the superlative construction, depends on the definiteness feature content of D.
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