Comparative Deletion and Comparative Subdeletion

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses the syntax of the Comparative Deletion (CD) construction and the Comparative Subdeletion (CSD) construction. It starts with a presentation of some central basic concepts about comparatives, including a brief background in scalar semantics, the interpretation of the comparative morpheme, and the transparent mapping operations from logical forms to semantics. Special attention is paid to the organization of the comparative complement and the structural relation among the degree morpheme, the gradable AP, and thethan‐phrase. The chapter further provides an overview of different analytic strategies toward CD and CSD. This overview includes a summary of arguments from the literature for the existence of gaps in CSD constructions. It also examines the nature of the relationship between the comparative complement and the matrix clause, addressing the question of whether the nexus is best characterized in terms of syntactic subordination or coordination. The chapter finishes with some remarks about multiple comparatives and reviews two influential current trends in research on comparatives that expand to cross‐linguistic variation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.