Hidden nominal structures in Japanese clausal comparatives

Hidden Nominal Structures in Japanese Clausal Comparatives

Recent debates on Japanese clausal comparatives have yielded several competing theories of their syntax and semantics with different implications for the issue of crosslinguistic variation in comparative constructions. This paper offers a novel syntactic account of Japanese clausal comparatives. It claims that despite their appearance, Japanese clausal comparatives in fact involve a nominal str...

A Semantics for Nominal Comparatives

This work adopts the perspective of plural logic and measurement theory in order rst to focus on the microstructure of comparative determiners; and second, to derive the properties of comparative determiners as these are studied in Generalized Quantiier Theory, locus of the most sophisticated semantic analysis of natural language determiners. The work here appears to be the rst to examine compa...

Nominal and Clausal Event Predicates

In this paper, I argue that not only PPs and adverbs can act as predicates of the event argument of the verb, but certain NPs and certain clauses can, as well. I will give syntactic and semantic arguments that NPs that are cognate objects and clauses of (at least some) nonbridge verbs are optional predicates of the event argument of the verb. With respect to clauses, I will argue that for indep...

Child Causatives: Acquisition of Bi-clausal Structures in Japanese

Invisible Degree Nominals in Japanese Clausal

English comparative sentences fall into two kinds: phrasal and clausal comparatives. Phrasal comparatives involve a single DP in the accusative case as the complement of than, while clausal comparatives involve a structure as big as a full clause. (1) a. John is smarter than her. Phrasal comparative b. John is smarter than she is (smart). Clausal comparative In the literature, two competing vie...