Ordinary superlative descriptions are well-known to provide safe harbor to negative polarity items (NPIs), as in the longest book anyone read. What is less well-known is that relative superlative descriptions also sometimes host NPIs, as in the loudest that anyone sang. We observe that this latter pattern is more general than has been previously described. In fact, relative superlatives can license NPIs outside of their own descriptions. On the one hand, we argue that this provides evidence that the superlative adjectives take sentential rather than nominal scope. But on the other, following insights in Howard 2014, we argue that traditional semantic accounts of scope-taking superlatives do not present the right monotonicity profile to account for the NPIs either. A recent, dynamic take on superlative semantics (Bumford 2017) is shown to do better.

众所周知，普通的最高级描述可以为负极性项目 (NPI) 提供安全港，就像任何人读过的最长的书中一样。鲜为人知的是，相对最高级的描述有时也包含 NPI，就像任何人唱的最响亮的一样。我们观察到后一种模式比之前描述的更普遍。事实上，相对最高级可以在他们自己的描述之外许可 NPI。一方面，我们认为这提供了最高级形容词采用句子而不是名义范围的证据。但另一方面，根据霍华德 2014 年的见解，我们认为传统的范围采取最高级语义解释也没有提供正确的单调性配置文件来解释 NPI。最近对最高级语义的动态处理（Bumford 2017）被证明做得更好。