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 structure whose nominal head is deleted by a syntactic deletion operation, and therefore are underlyingly phrasal comparatives. I demonstrate that this analysis explains the peculiar syntactic and semantic properties of the construction in question, some of which have been unidentified in the literature, and also that it is empirically superior to the previous accounts. My account also leads to a novel view of crosslinguistic variation according to which no semantic variation specific to comparative constructions is necessary to account for the difference between Japanese and English-type languages, contrary to what has recently been claimed, and their differences can be located solely in morphosyntax.