Superlative Modifiers as Concessive Conditionals

‘At least’, ‘at most’ and the ‘extreme’ measure: The Russian scalar limit operator construction po + Adj + mere

“…Although the syntactic structure of these phrases remains transparent, the semantics of their nominal component, mera, is bleached. Evidently, they are no longer functionally compositional, similarly to the counterpart minimal scalar operator constructions in other languages, such as the English at least (Kay 1997(Kay , 2004Geurts and Nowen 2007;Büring 2008;Geurts et al 2010;Biezma 2013 to name a few), the French au moins/du moins (Anscombre and Ducrot 1983: 139-161;Abé 2010), the Spanish por lo menos/al menos (San Martín Núñez and Rojas Inostroza 2020), the German wenigstens/ mindestens/zumindest (Grosz 2011;Gast 2013), the Hebrew lefaxot 'at least' (Katzir 2019a), the Chinese zuishao 'at least' (Chen 2018) or the Japanese sukunakutomo 'at least' (Hirayama and Brasoveanu 2018;Ihara and Mizutani 2020).…”

“…Though the items considered do not always contain a grammatical superlative (e.g. Ihara and Mizutani [2020] on Japanese sukunakutomo 'at least'), they are termed so in reference to their 'endpoint' meaning (cf. 'pragmatic superlatives' in Fauconnier [1975]).…”