Superlative ever in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish

Abstract

The paper examines borrowed instances of what we call emphatic superlative ever (ES-ever) into two Germanic languages (Dutch and German) and two Romance languages (French and Spanish). We base our study on extensive corpus data. We model the data in three stages ranging from constructional borrowing (Stage-1: el coolest job ever ‘the coolest job ever’), via diaconstructions (Stage-2: la mejor canción ever ‘the best song ever’), up to lexical borrowing (Stage-3: las portadas más photoshopeadas ever ‘the most photoshoped portals ever’). We extend an earlier approach to social meaning in HPSG to borrowing. The data extracted for this study is available at: https://osf.io/juewa/?view_only=215970c573d34b148815cc5653965697