Arabic Degree Semantics

A fundamental human cognitive skill is the ability to determine and compare the degree to which things exemplify qualitieshow tall someone is, how warm the water is, how angry the neighbor is, etc. Degree is so prominent in humans perception of their environment that it is commonly encoded as a grammatical category in human languages in the form of compara- tive and superlative forms of adjectives (taller, tallest) and words like more, less, very, enough, etc., referred to as degree modifiers. In addition to reflecting a fundamental percep- tual category, degree modifiers are a significant testing ground for two types of theories of meaning in human language: theories that interpret sentences directly as they are, and theories that posit mental rearrangements to the sentence before it is interpreted. In English and near- ly all other languages documented in this respect, degree modifiers occur directly next to the term whose amount they specify, as in Sarah drank the most coffee, where most is the degree modifier and coffee the scalar associate. While one type of theory derives the meaning of this sentence directly from the word order that occurs there, another type of theory claims that this sentence is mentally transformed into something along the lines of Sarah most drank cof- fee, and then that sentence is interpreted directly, as a comparison between Sarah and others to whom the phrase drank coffee applies. The transformational theory is motivated by indirect semantic evidence, since the transformation is not visible. But it has recently been discovered that in some dialects of modern Arabic, the coffee comparison above can visibly take rough- ly the form of the second sentence, where the degree modifier is separated from the scalar associate. The situation in Arabic allows us to evaluate the two theories in the context of a language whose surface word order mirrors what the transformational theory says is a direct representation of its meaning. This project investigates several specific constructions in Ara- bic that in better studied languages have served as testing grounds for theories of degree, while collecting new data from Syrian Arabic speakers living in Austria using techniques in semantic field methods. The Arabic pattern is exceedingly rare among the worlds languages, meaning that Arabic provides us with a unique window into the underlying architecture of the grammar of degree that is not provided by better studied languages. With this new data, we will be able to break through the confines of what can be known on the basis of previously studied languages and remove longstanding barriers to progress in the theory of meaning.

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