Symmetries in the Grammar of Quantity and Degree

This project seeks to formally characterize the manner in which the semantic categories "degree" and "quantity" are related in human language, through the investigation of constructions in which degree modifiers are co-opted as quantifiers. The existence of cases in which expressions in one category are borrowed into the other points to a degree of permeability in the boundary between the two categories. This permeability in turn suggests that these two cognitive domains share a similar architecture, so that expressions from one domain lend themselves to a parallel usage in the other. This research program is therefore at once theoretically reductive, demonstrating parallels between apparently separate linguistic domains, and revealing of parallels in the cognitive underpinnings of the perception of degree and quantity. To this end, the research proposed here contrasts the semantic behavior of two degree modifiers used quantificationally in two unrelated languages, namely German and Arabic. Previous linguistic research has shown the German quantifier meist (most) to display grammatical behaviors associated with superlative adjectives. This project investigates data indicating that the Arabic quantifier kull (every) is also a superlative adjective. The case of kull represents an additional instance, like meist but outside the Indo-European language family, of a degree modifier masquerading as a quantifier. This ease of transition exhibited by meist and kull between the categories "degree" and "quantity" suggests that these categories are similarly structured domains of thought. This research program explicitly compares German meist and Arabic kull in order to identify similarities and differences in their meaning and use, in order in turn to isolate the abstract commonalities in the structure of the cognitive domains they transition between. As a backdrop to this contrastive study, Arabic comparative and superlative constructions themselves are subject to analysis, representing the first time contemporary tools in semantic analysis have been brought to bear on degree constructions in Arabic. Such constructions in Arabic display properties that are not observed in other languages, and therefore present novel evidence with a direct bearing on current discussions in linguistic theory about the nature of the grammar of comparison and its relation to the superlative. This project therefore promises to answer significant linguistic questions while filling a substantial gap in the representation of non-Indo-European languages in contemporary semantic theory.