'At least' and her Prosodics; The influence of the epistemic and deontic interpretation of superlative quantifiers on their prosodic structure

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to search for a method to explore whether there is a correlation between the prosodics of superlative quantifiers and the way they can be interpret semantically. First, a small literature study of the semantic structure of superlative quantifiers is presented, in which their deontic and epistemic interpretations are discussed. Second, an overview of the relation between semantics and prosody is given. Finally, an experiment is conducted in which participants were asked to read out a text in which both epistemic and deontic superlative quantifiers were hidden. In the discussion the experiment is reflected and suggestions for further research are presented, because no differences were found