Roumyana Pancheva
\nUSC<\/p>\n
“One -er, (sort of) two thans”<\/p>\n
Friday
\nMarch 14th, 2008, 3:30pm<\/p>\n
[Room 32-141](http:\/\/whereis.mit.edu\/map-jpg?mapterms=32-141)<\/p>\n
There will be a party in Roumi’s honor beginning at 6:30pm at Sabine’s place.<\/p>\n
Abstract:<\/p>\n
>The syntax of comparatives shows a fair amount of variability cross-linguistically, but there are also patterns that call for an explanation. A number of languages have phrasal comparatives like the English ‘Mary is taller than me’. The syntactic behavior of the nominal following ‘than’ appears to support a direct analysis of these comparatives, with a degree operator ‘-er’ selecting an individual-denoting PP argument. Such an analysis, however, comes at a cost. The phrasal ‘-er’ has to be different from the ‘-er’ in clausal comparatives (‘Mary is taller than I am’), but languages do not seem to distinguish morphologically between two ‘-ers’. ‘Than’ is required to be semantically empty, yet its counterparts are commonly drawn from among certain spatial prepositions. In this talk, I suggest that the lexical inventory of comparative operators is limited to a single ‘-er’, whose arguments are predicates of degrees. ‘Than’ and its counterparts are partitive prepositions. Like partitive ‘of’ (‘a liter of the water’) and pseudo-partitive ‘of’ (‘a liter of water’), ‘than’ may have a definite description of degrees or a predicate of degrees as a complement. Clausal comparatives may instantiate both partitive types, depending on the nature of the ‘wh-’ degree operator in the ‘than’-clause. Phrasal comparatives may be derived from clauses that lack the CP layer and the ‘wh-’ degree operator residing there; consequently, such small clauses are interpreted as predicates of degrees, complements to pseudo-partitive ‘than’. Ultimately, the syntax of comparatives turns out to be rather tightly constrained, and to show cross-domain parallels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Roumyana Pancheva USC “One -er, (sort of) two thans” Friday March 14th, 2008, 3:30pm [Room 32-141](http:\/\/whereis.mit.edu\/map-jpg?mapterms=32-141) There will be a party in Roumi’s honor beginning at 6:30pm at Sabine’s place. Abstract: >The syntax of comparatives shows a fair amount of variability cross-linguistically, but there are also patterns that call for an explanation. A number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}