Multi-headed comparatives in Portuguese

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 5 (2006), 5-35 ISSN 1645-4537

This paper aims at offering a global picture of the subtype of comparative constructions known as ‘multi-headed comparatives’ (from the fact that they exhibit more than one comparative operator in semantic interdependence). As a prerequisite to the fulfilment of his goal, an attempt will be made to clarify the scope of the notion ‘comparative construction’ and to draw a general typology of such...

Quantifiers in Comparatives

Comparatives in Context

We propose a model of semantic interpretation of comparatives which is based on a mechanism for semantic copying. Besides common phrasal and clausal forms of comparatives, our model also incorporates the analysis of referential and textual phenomena that interact with the interpretation of comparatives, viz. metonymies and omitted complements. In order to allow for efficient processing, guidanc...

Typology of Comparatives

It is well-known that an adjective is not a universal part of speech. As pointed out in the previous researches, many oceanic languages do not have a morphologically distinguished adjective class. The only criteria which distinguish adjectives from verbs and nouns could be whether they appear in comparative construction or not. However, even comparative construction is not universal. Whereas mo...

The Quest for Multi-headed Worms

In [6], Pouget et al. have conjectured the existence of so-called multiheaded worms and found a couple of them on attack traces collected on a single honeypot. These worms take advantage of several distinct attack techniques to propagate but they use only one of them against a given target. From a victim’s viewpoint, they are therefore indistinguishable from the other classical worms that alway...