| Summary: | <p>Superlative sentences with modal modifiers like <em>possible</em> give rise to the so-called 'modal superlative reading' (Larson 2000, Schwarz 2005). The present paper uses this reading to investigate an open issue in degree constructions: whereas two different lexical entries have been argued to exist for the comparative morpheme -<em>er</em> (3-place and 2-place), it is not clear whether two entries are needed for the superlative morpheme -<em>est</em>. The paper argues that, with 3-place –<em>est</em>, otherwise unmotivated syntactic material would to have to be postulated and that, even with this material, not all modal superlative examples would be assigned correct truth conditions. In contrast, 2-place -<em>est</em> can generate the modal superlative reading in all the cases, as shown in Romero (to appear, under review). 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