Structure preservation in comparatives

Abstract

Comparatives involve various dimensions for comparison, but not anything goes: "more coffee" involves volume or weight, but not temperature, while "more coffees" involves number, not volume or weight. In general, the extant literature assumes that the difference between "more coffee/coffees" reflects a morphosyntactic ambiguity of "more", such that it spells out MUCH-ER with bare nouns, and MANY-ER with plural nouns. Semantically, MUCH introduces a variable over measure functions (with constraints), whereas MANY introduces a cardinality function. I argue for an alternative, univocal theory based on the decomposition MUCH-ER, and account for the observed patterns of constrained variability by means of a stronger condition on the selection of measure functions than has previously been proposed.

WHAT more IS

“…An even broader look at the crosslinguistic picture confirms the viability of the general reduction: where English has much / many , other languages display a univocal form paired with (broadly) some marker of plurality; Wellwood () cites additional examples from Mandarin, Macedonian, Italian, and Bangla. Moreover, in all cases the interpretive pattern is the same as it is in English: the base form corresponding to much involves variable dimensions, while the form occurring in broadly plural contexts involves only number.…”

“…Bresnan and others allowed the decompositional theory just described to coexist alongside a distinct decomposition in which more realizes the conflation many plus ‐er . Wellwood (), though, argues that the surface form many itself realizes much along with the nominal plural morpheme, pl (that realized as ‐s in, for example, coffees ). Any sufficient morphophonological rule like (11) is posited to account for the surface variation…”

“…In Wellwood (, forthcoming), I argued that comparatives like (30b) are (syntactically and semantically) more like the verbal comparative in (28b) than like the adjectival comparative in (22a): they involve quantification over pluralities of events. Here, though, the relevant pluralities are derived from a lexically stative property: abstract syntax contributes functional structure that is interpreted as a map from a property of states onto a property of occasions on which such states hold, which is subsequently pluralized.…”

“…A theory of measure selection constrained only by (44) fails to predict the restriction to number in such cases (see Wellwood , forthcoming). For example, a plurality consisting of three cups of coffee weighs more than a plurality consisting of two cups of coffee, but weight isn't permissible for (45a), etc.…”

Interpreting Degree Semantics

“…31 Incidentally, noteworthy Italian speaker Paolo Santorio, p.c., answers this question with a resounding "yes!". by number with more (see Wellwood, 2018 and references therein) while mass predications can but need not (see Barner and Snedeker, 2005 for experimental evidence), then we might expect more spaghetti to show more flexibility in its evaluation in English than in Italian when (say) number and volume are available as orthogonal options. Yet, we might appreciate a common perception by investigating how speakers view the images independently of language by constructing a comparable task that renders linguistic encoding unusable, e.g., by comparing similarity judgments of the same pairs of images, delivered while performing verbal shadowing 32 .…”