What grammatical features should we assign to the Danish superlative forms -st and -ste?

Question

When entering Danish lexemes into Wikidata, I have been unsure which grammatical features one should assign to the Danish superlative forms "-st" and "-ste" for adjectives, e.g., in bedst and bedste. The question is whether/how they relates to grammatical number (singular/plural) and definiteness (definite/indefinite) or any other grammatical feature.

I now see that English Wiktionary regard the -st form as "predicative" and the -ste form as "attributive", e.g., at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stor#Danish. From this information, neither the grammatical number nor the definiteness are characteristics of the forms.

Is the English Wiktionary correct in stating that the grammatical feature for superlative forms of adjectives should be set to either "attributive" or "predicative" or are there any subtleties I am missing? I cannot come up with any exceptions.

Answer 1

Your confusion seems to be coming from the fact that it's unidiomatic for superlative adjectives to be attributive to indefinite nouns. This is the same in English.

*a greatest man

*en størst mand

In all other cases (excepting lille, I think, and probably a few other irregulars), an -e is suffixed to adjectives if one of the following hold:

• specific
• plural
• vocative

Answer 2

Det Centrale Ordregister (COR, The Danish Central Word Registry) published by Dansk Sprognævn at https://ordregister.dk/ now has the grammatical features indicated. For 'stor' the entries for the superlative adjective forms in COR 1.0 are:

COR.15602.305.01        stor            adj.superl.sg.ubest     størst  1
COR.15602.306.01        stor            adj.superl.sg.best      største 1
COR.15602.307.01        stor            adj.superl.pl   største 1

So -st is singular indefinite and -ste is either singular definite or plural.

However, I am somewhat struggling to conform to this scheme. To me:

• De er størst. (plural but -st)
• ?De er største.