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In this article, we propose that degree heads and degree clauses form a constituent not at the point where the degree head is merged, but after QR of the degree head and countercyclic merger of the degree clause. We derive a generalization originally outlined in Williams 1974 that the scope of the comparative degree quantifier is exactly as high as the site of attachment of the degree clause. This generalization is shown to follow from the derivational mechanism of countercyclic merger and a semantic property of the comparative degree head, namely, its nonconservativity.Keywords: comparatives, scope, interpretation of copies, antecedentcontained deletion (ACD), conservativity, extrapositionThe focus of this article is the place of degree clauses (i.e., than-/as-phrases) in the overall architecture of comparatives.1 We propose that degree clauses are merged late, after the degree head -er/as has moved to a scope position.2 The position where the degree clause merges is the position in which it is pronounced. Degree clauses do not move by themselves, nor do they move covertly with the degree head. The movement of the degree head is covert; it has no effect on how the generated structure is realized at PF. The covert nature of this movement is not the result of post-Spell-Out timing; temporally, it precedes the merger of the degree clause, which does affect PF. Rather, the movement of the degree head is covert because the lower copy of the chain is pronounced instead of the head of the chain. This may be so because of general properties of Quantifier Raising (QR), or it may be the result of morphological well-formedness conditions on the realization of the degree head affix.Our proposal allows us to refine-and, importantly, motivate-Williams's generalization with respect to degree constructions. Williams (1974) noted a correlation between the scope of the DP out of which a constituent has been extraposed and the adjunction site of the extraposed expression. Fox and Nissenbaum (1999) and Fox (2002) provide an analysis of extraposition that ensures that the scope of a source DP is at least as high as the attachment site of the extraposed We are specially indebted to Danny Fox and Irene Heim for extensive discussions. We would also like to thank our anonymous reviewers, Dave Embick, Sabine Iatridou, Kyle Johnson, Audrey Li, Ora Matushansky, Barry Schein, Philippe Schlenker, Bernhard Schwarz, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, and audiences at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Leiden, USC-UCLA syntax-semantics seminar, Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP) 2001, MIT LingLunch, and the CUNY Syntax Supper.1 Although we do not discuss result clauses and the degree heads that license them here, as in (i), our general proposal extends to them too.(i) a. Julien is so crazy that he eats ants. b. Monica is too cool to care. 2 For ease of exposition, from now on we will refer to the degree head as -er, although the proposal is meant to apply to the equative degree head as as well.

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs ("regulars") is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, "irregular" English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over midline parietal sites (P600s), and seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory.

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Reference to non-overt arguments has been made in the description of a wide range of syntactic phenomena. Some of them (PRO, pro, A/A ¼ -traces) are relatively well-understood and there exists a certain consensus regarding their analysis. There is another class of non-overt arguments, often referred to as implicit arguments, for which no such consensus prevails. Implicit arguments do not seem to form a unified class. To appreciate this let us examine some cases which have been argued to involve implicit arguments. (1) Implicit agents of passives (vs. middles and unnacusatives) a. This ship was sunk [PRO to collect the insurance]. (Passive) b. # This ship sank [PRO to collect the insurance]. (Unaccusative) c. *This ship sinks easily [PRO to collect the insurance]. (Middle) (2) Benefactive arguments of adjectives (from Roeper (1987)) a. It is necessary/*inevitable [PRO to go]. b. It is wise/*probable [PRO to go]. (3) The bearer of the obligation of a deontic modal a. The books can be sold [without PRO reading them]. (from Chomsky (1982) via Williams (1985)) b. *The books might have been sold [without PRO reading them]. (from Kratzer (1991))i. a. John ran ( ËÓÙÖ from the house) ( Ó Ð to the store) ( È Ø along the river). b. John cut the salami ( ÁÒ×ØÖÙÑ ÒØ with a knife).

We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions involved in syntactic and semantic processing. Healthy adult males read well-formed sentences randomly intermixed with sentences which either contained violations of syntactic structure or were semantically implausible. Reading anomalous sentences, as compared to well-formed sentences, yielded distinct patterns of activation for the two violation types. Syntactic violations elicited significantly greater activation than semantic violations primarily in superior frontal cortex. Semantically incongruent sentences elicited greater activation than syntactic violations in the left hippocampal and parahippocampal gyri, the angular gyri bilaterally, the right middle temporal gyrus, and the left inferior frontal sulcus. These results demonstrate that syntactic and semantic processing result in nonidentical patterns of activation, including greater frontal engagement during syntactic processing and larger increases in temporal and temporo-parietal regions during semantic analyses.