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Blanca Croitor Romanian Academy, Bucharest

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Ion Giurgea Romanian Academy, Bucharest

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We address the ongoing debate between raising and in-situ analyses of relative superlatives. We present some arguments in favor of the in-situ analysis of DP-internal relative superlatives: first, the in-situ analysis accounts straightforwardly for the use of the definite article; we show that a recent attempt to explain the use of THE under the raising analysis makes incorrect predictions. Secondly, there is evidence that only a sub-type of relative superlatives, that have certain peculiar properties, rely on raising; crucially, these superlatives lack the definite article. This divide among relative superlatives has first been proposed by Pancheva & Tomaszewicz (2012) for certain adnominal superlatives. We add another context which supports this divide — the predicative context, where relative superlatives which can only be interpreted by raising to the vicinity of the correlate can be found. Based on new data coming from Romanian, we show that these predicative superlatives have different properties from DP-internal relative superlatives, which can be explained if the former involve raising and the latter are interpreted DP-internally.

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Editors

Editor(s)-in-Chief: Katalin É. Kiss,
Ferenc Kiefer

Editor: Éva Dékány

Technical Editor: Zoltán G. Kiss

Review Editor: Beáta Gyuris

Editorial Board

  • Anne Abeillé
  • Željko Bošković
  • Marcel den Dikken
  • Hans-Martin Gärtner
  • Elly van Gelderen
  • Anders Holmberg
  • Katarzyna Jaszczolt
  • István Kenesei
  • Anikó Lipták
  • Katalin Mády
  • Gereon Müller
  • Csaba Pléh
  • Giampaolo Salvi
  • Irina Sekerina
  • Péter Siptár
  • Gregory Stump
  • Peter Svenonius
  • Anne Tamm
  • Akira Watanabe
  • Jeroen van de Weijer

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Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Language English
Size  
Year of
Foundation
1951
Publication
Programme
changed title
Volumes
per Year
 
Issues
per Year
 
Founder Magyar Tudományos Akadémia  
Founder's
Address
H-1051 Budapest, Hungary, Széchenyi István tér 9.
Publisher Akadémiai Kiadó
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Address
H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
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Publisher
Chief Executive Officer, Akadémiai Kiadó
ISSN 1216-8076 (Print)
ISSN 1588-2624 (Online)