The comparative morpheme in Modern Japanese: looking at the core from ‘outside’

Abstract

Japanese differs from languages like English in that it (usually) has no overt comparative morphology like the English -er/more. However, in Modern Japanese yori can be used as the equivalent of the English comparative morpheme more in limited environments. (It is often assumed that the comparative morpheme yori developed due to the necessity for translation of comparative sentences written in European languages.) The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the comparative morpheme in Modern Japanese and to consider what its existence tells us about the semantics of ‘regular’ Japanese comparatives. I argue that in Japanese the comparative morpheme for pure comparison is used in a supplementary way in that it can only be used when a given sentence cannot otherwise express a meaning of comparison. I also argue, building on the idea of selection in Kennedy (Standards of comparison. Handout from Colloque de Syntaxe et Semantique a Paris, 2007a), that the comparative morpheme yori implicitly selects a standard yori PP (that has a meaning of comparison) at LF. We will also observe that there are native speakers who use the comparative morpheme yori freely as an intensifier meaning ‘still more’, and I argue that the development of the intensification use can be viewed as another strategy of avoiding the violation of the constraint: do not use a comparative morpheme for pure comparison if it is not necessary. Various proposals have been made regarding where the meaning of comparison is encoded in regular Japanese comparatives: a null comparative morpheme, a standard marker, or a gradable predicate. This paper argues that the development of the comparative morpheme for pure comparison and its ‘supplemental’ nature provide supportive evidence for the view that the standard marker expresses a meaning of comparison (e.g., Kennedy 2007a; Hayashishita, J East Asian Linguist 18:65–100, 2009; Schwarzschild, “Incomplete” comparatives. Paper presented at MIT workshop on comparatives, 2010).