[I am too busy with the LSA institute and my pragmatic course to post much these days, but here’s one new piece of work that I thought people might want to look at hot off the presses:]

Bart Geurts and Rick Nouwen. “At least et al. – The semantics of scalar modifiers”, ms, Nijmegen and Frankfurt, July 12, 2005.

Introduction: This paper is concerned with what we propose to call scalar modifiers. Expressions falling under this rubric come in two types: superlative (‘at least’, ‘at most’) and comparative (‘more than’, ‘less/fewer than’). Our focus of attention will be on superlative and comparative quantifiers, like ‘at most three beers’ and ‘more than two vodkas’, though other uses of scalar modifiers will be taken into account as well.

It might seem that the semantics of scalar modifiers is a rather straightforward matter, but readers of Kay (1992) and Krifka (1999) will be aware that it isn’t. The problems we will concentrate on all have to do with the fact that the distinction between comparative and scalar modifiers runs much deeper than is generally acknowledged. The aim of this paper is twofold: to establish that the differences between comparative and superlative modifiers are profound, and then to explain them. The keystone in our proposal is that superlative but not comparative modifiers are modal expressions.