Most Meanings Are Superlative

Recent research on the semantics of quantificational expressions has taken on the task of relating the truth-conditional import of quantifiers with their impact on verification procedures. In particular, the semantic analysis and verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most have been studied in a variety of ways in an effort to reveal the correct semantic analysis of most. This paper presents new experimental evidence in favor of a treatment that analyzes most uniformly as a superlative construction built in the syntax, rather than a quantificational determiner with rich internal semantics that does not, however, interface with syntax any more than other lexical determiners do. The evidence comes in the form of a latent superlative reading of sentences with most in subject position, like most of the dots are blue. We show, using three different experiments involving verification tasks, that most is ambiguous in this environment between a dominant proportional reading and a latent superlative reading.