Clausal vs Phrasal Comparatives

Abstract

This chapter on clausal comparatives (Ann is taller than Ben is) and their phrasal variants (Ann is taller than Ben) pursues three interrelated objectives. First, it provides an overview of the central phenomena that have guided the research on the semantics of these constructions from the 1970s on, also taking into consideration aspects of crosslinguistic variation. A second goal consists in tracing the development of the strategies that have been employed in the compositional analysis of comparatives and the derivation of their underlying LF‐representations. Third, the chapter elaborates on two strands of analyses toward phrasal comparatives – the reduction analysis and the direct analysis – which disagree on the amount of abstract syntactic structure they assign to the constituent followingthan. Special attention is given to the formal tools for interpreting the LFs posited by these two competing theoretical choices, and to the diagnostics that have been developed to discriminate between them. The debate has important repercussions, among others, for the organization of the functional lexicon; the limits of crosslinguistic variation; the division of labor between the syntactic and the semantic component; and the nature of the operations implicated in translating surface syntactic trees into transparently interpretable LF‐representations.