Abstract
In sentences like Mary found three shells more than Joan did , three appears to syntactically modify the object noun shells yet is interpreted as a specification of the difference between the number of shells that Mary found and the number that Joan found. Accordingly, syntactic and semantic analyses of such cases cast the numeral as a modifier of more in the transformational base for this construction. In this paper, I present evidence from Arabic indicating that the numeral is a direct modifier of the plural noun in the counterpart construction in that language. I propose that derivational processes sever its thematic relation to the plural noun and reintegrate it as a modifier of the differential argument of the comparative morpheme. What makes this possible is raising of the numeral together with late insertion of the comparative degree phrase (DegP), as previously proposed for superlative DegPs. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
The English comparative morpheme -er seen in (1a) is conventionally taken to denote a relation between two sets of degrees, one contributed by the than-clause and one contributed by the matrix clause (Cresswell 1976, Heim 1985, and many others)
Arabic appears to reflect the LF scope of the comparative degree phrase (DegP) in its surface word order, and the present analysis presents a mechanism through which a numeral adjacent to the plural scalar associate for the comparative may function as a differential specifier of the comparative at LF
I have presented an analysis of sentences of the form Sarah found three shells more than Nabil in Syrian Arabic, in which the numeral three forms a syntactic constituent with the object noun but yet is interpreted as a specification of the differential of the comparative
Summary
The English comparative morpheme -er seen in (1a) is conventionally taken to denote a relation between two sets of degrees, one contributed by the than-clause and one contributed by the matrix clause (Cresswell 1976, Heim 1985, and many others). In the structure in (3b), the numeral does not modify the plural noun it precedes in the surface structure It modifies the comparative morpheme -er, and is interpreted as a specification of its differential argument. The construction has properties which suggest that it does not display the constituency in (3b), but rather that in (6), where the numeral modifies the plural noun it precedes directly and the entire degree phrase is adverbial (adjoined to VP). This alone does not suffice to ‘sever’ the semantic relationship between the numeral and the plural noun What accomplishes this is the second ingredient, namely a compositional step found in movement analyses of the superlative, in which a degree quantifier may be inserted between another quantifier and the associated abstraction index (Heim 1985, 1999).
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