Corepresentational Grammar and Parsing English Comparatives

Marcus [3] notes that the syntax of English comparative constructions is highly complex, and claims that both syntactic end semantic information must be available for them to be parsed. This paper argues that comparatives can be structurally analyzed on the basis of syntactic information alone via a s t r i c t l y surface-based grammar. Such a grammar is given in Ryan [5], based on the corepresentational model of Kac I l l . While the grammar does not define a parsing algorithm per se, i t nonetheless expresses regularities of surface organization and i ts relationship to semantic interpretation that an adequate parser would be expected to incorporate. This paper wi l l discuss four problem areas in the description of comparatives and wi l l outline the sections of the grammar of [5] that apply to them.