Presentation

Summary by Nate Blaylock

Thursday, 11:55am. I had just finished eating lunch at the Cougareat Taco Bell. I walked past the gaping hole that used to be the Quad, anticipating the meeting to which I was going. This was no Lingsoc meeting; this was a meeting of the Linguistics Circle, the department faculty.

I entered the faculty lounge. There were still seats at the table, but I opted for the couch in the back of the room. I didn't want to assert my presence, being a lowly undergraduate. Soon, the rest of the faculty entered, and the room was packed. Dr. Lonsdale, a new faculty member recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon, came in the room, fired up the overhead projector, and began his lecture on the semantics of superlatives in English. I was able to understand the introduction and first few minutes quite well.

Superlative semantics has not been given much attention in research. Most research has centered around comparatives. Much comparative research ends saying, "these theories probably work for superlatives too." Dr. Lonsdale said that this was not quite the case when he started researching superlatives at Carnegie Mellon.

The semantics of comparatives are often expressed as formal logic expressions. Unfortunately, at this part of the lecture, I started struggling. Formal Logic is not my forte. Let me explain it as I understood it, disposing of the logic expressions, because I didn't understand them very much.

Take, for example, the sentence, "George is taller than Bill." This can be expressed logically as, "There exists some degree of tallness that George reaches, but Bill does not reach." This logic expression essentially contains the meaning (semantics) of the sentence.

Superlative sentences can also be expressed in a comparative way. For example: "George is the tallest of all the boys," it seems, can also be expressed as "George is taller than all the boys." Then it can be reduced to its logic form: "For the given set of boys, there exists a degree of tallness that George reaches, but the boys do not." Dr. Lonsdale asked, "Do these have the same meaning?" At first glance, they did. "But what if George were a giraffe?" he inquired.

"George the giraffe is taller than all the boys" works just fine. However, "George the giraffe is the tallest of all the boys" does not. ("Unless George is a boy giraffe", added Sister Hallen) The superlative infers that George is one of the boys. Therefore, we must change the logic expression of the superlative to accommodate this meaning. It becomes "For the given set of boys, of which George is a member, there exists a degree of tallness . . ."

In addition to this, Dr. Lonsdale also talked about other issues of superlatives. Overall, the lecture was fascinating. There really is knowledge beyond Linguistics 430. There are many fascinating aspects of language still to be discovered. For all lectures, of which this lecture was a part, there exists a degree of fascinating-ness to which this lecture was fascinating and other lectures were not fascinating. Thanks Dr. Lonsdale!