How many Mosts?

Abstract

This paper investigates the various contexts in which the lexical item most can be used (e.g. Fred has read most/the most/at most 15 Shakespeare plays; Fred bought the most expensive book), with the goal of determining to what extent they can be reduced to a single underlying core semantics. It is shown that most across its uses can be analyzed as the superlative form of many or much, an approach that builds on work by Hackl (2009). However, the adequate treatment of most as a proportional quantifier requires also positing a role for pragmatic strengthening of semantic meaning.