Reduced and unreduced phrasal comparatives

Authors: Rajesh Bhatt Shoichi Takahashi

Publish Date: 2011/06/21

Volume: 29, Issue: 3, Pages: 581-620

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Abstract

Degree heads combine with individual John is taller than Mary as well as clausal arguments John is taller than Mary is Does the degree head have the same meaning in these two argument structures Two kinds of answers have been proposed in the literature I there is a single meaning where the 2place degree head combines with a degree predicate with a reduction operation that derives the DP argument from a degree predicate denoting clausal argument and II there are distinct meanings for each argument structure one combining with an individual denoting DP 3place degree head and the other with a degree predicate denoting clause 2place degree head We show that languages vary in which of these answers they choose English goes for option I and HindiUrdu and Japanese for versions of option II Our account of this variation assumes that the crosslinguistic distribution of 2place and 3place degree heads is not in itself subject to crosslinguistic parametrization they are just syntactic projections of the basic meaning of comparison We advance a specific proposal which derives the differences between the languages from the morphosyntactic properties of ‘than’ and a preference for minimal structureThe NLLT reviewers and our editor Marcel den Dikken gave us very useful comments and presentational advice The paper is much more readable because of their help We thank audiences at the GLOW conferences in Tromsø and Newcastle the SALT at the University of Connecticut the comparatives workshop at the University of Chicago and colloquia at the Ohio State University McGill University Fukuoka University Kanda University of International Studies University of Maryland University of Pennsylvania University of California at Los Angeles and Harvard University For their detailed comments and suggestions we are indebted to Sigrid Beck Danny Fox Irene Heim Caroline Heycock Kyle Johnson Chris Kennedy Anthony Kroch Winfried Lechner Jason Merchant Roumi Pancheva Carl Pollard Beatrice Santorini Bernhard Schwarz Junko Shimoyama Yasutada Sudo and Eytan Zweig Rajesh Bhatt was supported by a collaborative NSF grant CNS0751171 and Shoichi Takahashi by a Research Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists under grant 9919

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