Abstract

This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (Alice is tall compared to Bob) and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (Alice is taller than Bob) and sentences with adjectives in plain positive form (Alice is tall). We consider evidence from two experiments that tested judgments about these three kinds of sentence, and provide a semantics for implicit comparatives from the perspective of degree semantics.

Highlights

  • This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (1), and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (2) and sentences with adjectives in their plain positive form (3):1 (1) Alice is tall compared to Bob

  • This provides evidence for the claim that an implicit comparative entails the corresponding explicit comparative. It suggests that not any positive difference between the heights of x and y is sufficient to make x is tall compared to y true

  • Any positive difference between the heights of x and y is sufficient to make the explicit comparative x is taller than y true, but the likelihood of our participants judging that x is tall compared to y increased as the difference between x and y increased

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Summary

Introduction

This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (1), and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (2) and sentences with adjectives in their plain positive form (3):1(1) Alice is tall compared to Bob.(2) Alice is taller than Bob.(3) Alice is tall.We first present the results of two experiments probing the empirical profile of these three categories of sentence. The adjective tall denotes the function tall, which maps objects onto their heights:. On this approach, gradable adjectives combine with degree morphology to produce properties of individuals. Gradable adjectives combine with degree morphology to produce properties of individuals This is precisely what happens in the case of explicit comparatives. Unlike other adjectives, gradable adjectives do not map individuals onto truth-values, they cannot combine directly with the subject of the sentence To overcome this difficulty, proponents of degree semantic approaches often maintain that, in the positive form, gradable adjectives occur along with an unpronounced morpheme POS, which denotes a function from measure functions to properties of individuals. In (3), POS combines with tall and returns a property that is instantiated by an object just in case its height is equal to or greater than a certain standard:

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