At most at last

Abstract

Recent pragmatic accounts derive the ignorance inferences to which superlative modifiers give rise as quantity implicatures in a neo-Gricean framework. While these approaches successfully account for the interaction of at least with modals, the behavior of at most remains a puzzle. I propose that at most is composed of an antonymizing operator and at least and show how this accounts for the interaction of at most with modals and quantifiers in a neo-Gricean framework.