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At Least et al.: The Semantics of Scalar Modifiers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Bart Geurts and
Rick Nouwen
Bart Geurts*
Affiliation:
University of Nijmegen
Rick Nouwen*
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
*
Department of Philosophy, University of Nijmegen, Postbox 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands [bart.geurts@phil.ru.nl]
Utrecht Institute for Linguistics, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands [rick.nouwen @let.uu.nl]
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Abstract

On the naive account of scalar modifiers like more than and at least, At least three girls snored is synonymous with More than two girls snored, and both sentences mean that the number of snoring girls exceeded two (the same, mutatis mutandis, for sentences with at most and less/fewer than). We show that this is false and propose an alternative theory, according to which superlative modifiers (at least/most) are quite different from comparative ones (more/less/fewer than). Whereas the naive theory is basically right about comparative modifiers, it is wrong about superlative modifiers, which we claim have a MODAL meaning: an utterance of At least three girls snored conveys two things: first, that it is CERTAIN that there was a group of three snoring girls, and second, that more than four girls MAY have snored. We argue that this analysis explains various facts that are problematic for the naive view, which have to do with specificity, distributional differences between superlative and comparative modifiers, differential patterns of inference licensed by these expressions, and the way they interact with various operators, like modals and negation.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 83 , Issue 3 , September 2007, pp. 533 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by Linguistic Society of America

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