Superlatives in Teaching General Chemistry

Presuppositions in Superlatives

This paper discusses the distributive reading of plural superlatives. We argue that the compositional interpretation of plural superlative sentences requires that the referent of the superlative description is excluded from the comparison class associated with the degree morphology. We extend the claim to superlatives in general. The proposal implies that we need to rethink the presupposition c...

Annotating Superlatives

This paper describes a three-part annotation scheme for superlatives: The first identifies syntactic classes, since superlatives can serve different semantic purposes. The second and third only apply to superlatives that express straight-forward comparisons between targets and their comparison sets. The second form of annotation identifies the spans of each target and comparison set, which is o...

Comparative Superlatives in Relative Clauses

Chemistry for whom? Gender awareness in teaching and learning chemistry

Marie Ståhl and Anita Hussénius have defined what discourses dominate national tests in chemistry for Grade 9 in Sweden by using feminist, critical didactic perspectives. This response seeks to expand the results in Ståhl and Hussénius’s article Chemistry inside an epistemological community box!—Discursive exclusions and inclusions in the Swedish national tests in chemistry, by using different ...

Computing Genitive Superlatives

Superlative expressions (such as “the tallest boy”) single out entities by comparing them to others with respect to a set of properties. Therefore, a proper semantics for a superlative expression requires a correct computation of the comparison set. In most of the cases, this can be done in a compositional fashion (leaving contextual influences aside). When superlative adjectives occur in preno...