Constructions for measurement and comparison in Japanese and English

We have been investigating in recent years various constructions in Japanese and English in an onomasiological, or encoding, approach. That is, rather than questioning what an expression means (a decoding, or semasiological, approach), an onomasiological approach departs from a concept and asks how it can be expressed — radically distinct from organizing expressions by lexical items or phraseological types and then describing their meanings.