The bestest

In my German class last week we learnt about comparatives and superlatives. German is simpler than English in this respect, as it always adds a suffix: -er for comparatives, -(e)ste(n) for superlatives. For superlatives, there are two ways of doing it. You either say am intelligentesten or die intelligenteste.

As usual, there's a really simple rule that my book didn't tell me and I had to go looking for. You use the am kind when it's predicative (not followed by the noun it modifies), as in Laura is the most intelligent, and you use the other kind when it's attributive (followed by the noun), as in She is the most intelligent woman in the room.

Some of the exercises I had to do involved wh-questions, like Which hotel was the nicest?. We can analyse these (in some theories) as having an understood hotel following nicest: we know that it means the nicest hotel. This is more evident with a question like Which biscuits did she bake?: it corresponds with She baked which biscuits, which relates to the answer She baked these biscuits.

Note, though, that we can't so easily put the wh-phrase back with the hotel question: *(It) was the nicest which hotel just doesn't work at all. This perhaps explains my observation. I had predicted that maybe when you have a wh-question, you'd use the der/die/das form, because there is an understood noun and it's sort of attributive. Sadly for me and my homework answers, this turned out not to be the case, and you use the am form there. Not so sad for the theory, though, because maybe this is precisely because of the impossibility of 'putting back' the wh-phrase to the position following the adjective.

Why did the dinosaurs die out?

The other day (cannot now remember where but I suspect QI), I heard someone ask this question:

Why did the man who invented the weather forecast think that the dinosaurs died out?

My suggested answer was:

Because they did?

In fact, the answer was supposed to be:

Because they were too big to fit on the ark. 

You see the problem here. I have (some might suspect wilfully) misinterpreted the scope of why. I understood it as referring to the verb phrase think that the dinosaurs died out, and so asking why he thought that. It in fact referred to the verb phrase died out, and was asking why they died. The why-question could be asking about either of these things, as in both cases the corresponding because-clause would be at the end of the sentence:

The man who invented the weather forecast thought that the dinosaurs died out because they did (in fact) die out.
The man who invented the weather forecast thought that the dinosaurs died out because they were too big for the ark. 

The difference in meaning comes about because of a difference in the syntactic structure. We can't see or hear this, but it's there. I've colour-coded the clauses here to make it clearer what belongs to what:

[The man who invented the weather forecast thought [that the dinosaurs died out] because they did (in fact) die out]

[The man who invented the weather forecast thought [that the dinosaurs died out because they were too big for the ark]]

In both cases, the man who invented the weather forecast thought something. In the first example, he thought that the dinosaurs died out, and we also get to hear the reason why he thought that. In the second example, he thought that the dinosaurs died out because they were too big for the ark (and all of that is one single thought).

I think that I was led towards the interpretation I chose because of the presence of that, which is optional here. When it's present, because it doesn't have to be there, my little brain wanted to assign it some job, and that job was to kind of turn the clause it introduced into a finished-off unit (that is a declarative clause introducer). So my little brain said 'it is a fact that the dinosaurs died out. Why did this man think that this thing happened?'.