The proceedings of this year’s HPSG conference are now available! The volume includes a contribution
by Manfred Sailer & Nicolas Lamoure on “Superlative ever in Dutch,
French, German, and Spanish.”
The paper examines
borrowed instances of emphatic superlative ever (ES-ever) into
two Germanic languages (Dutch and German) and two Romance languages (French and
Spanish). Manfred & Nicolas extracted naturally occurring instances of ES-ever
and modeled the data in three stages:
- Stage-1: constructional borrowing (el coolest
job ever ‘the coolest job ever’),
- Stage-2: diaconstruction (la mejor
canción ever ‘the best song ever’),
- Stage-3: lexical borrowing (las portadas más
photoshopeadas ever ‘the most photoshoped portals ever’).
In their formalization,
they extend the HPSG approach to social meaning taken in Asadpour et al. 2022 to borrowing.
Manfred & Nicolas
had presented part of this work earlier in a more informal way at the workshop on
“Coexistence, Competion, and Change” at DGfS 2023. This work is also related to the initiative on the Dynamics of Asymmetric Language
Contact (DALC).
References
Asadpour, Hiwa, Shene
Hassan & Manfred Sailer. 2022. Non-wh relatives in English and
Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use. In Stefan Müller & Elodie Winckel
(eds.), Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Head-Driven
Phrase Structure Grammar, Online (Nagoya/Tokyo), 6–26. Frankfurt/Main: Uni-
versity Library. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2022.1)
Sailer, Manfred & Lamoure, Nicolas. 2023. Superlative ever in Dutch,
French, German, and Spanish. In Stefan Müller & Elodie Winckel (eds):
Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase
Structure Grammar 80–100. Frankfurt/Main: University Library. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2023.5)
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