Positive Standards of Comparison

Research on the semantics of gradable adjectives has, among others, the following two preoccupations: the nature of the degree-comparison relation expressed by the degree morphology (more/-er, less, etc.) and the way in which the standard of comparison is expressed. Here I wish to examine a combination of these two elements that has not, to the best of my knowledge, been described before. In particular, I will examine an English adjective construction in which the gradable adjective appears in the positive degree and the standard of comparison is specified overtly by an infinitival relative clause. The construction is of interest in part because it shows a novel way in which standards may expressed with positives. Its behavior also supports a recent proposal by Kennedy (2007) about the effect of semantic scale structure on default standards for positives. It thus sheds important new light on the ways in which standards are determined for positives, and in turn on the semantics of gradability more generally. The construction of interest is shown in (1); I call it the nominal attributive-withinfinitive construction (nominal AIC). A major focus of discussion will be the relationship between nominal AICs and the more well-known gradable adjective constructions shown in (2), the positive and comparative.