Rival Forms of Comparatives in Russian

Paradigm leveling in non-standard Russian: consonant alternations in comparatives and nouns

This paper analyzes a paradigm leveling process currently taking place in Russian that affects consonant alternations. In standard Russian, these alternations are present in some verb forms (ljubit’ ‘to love’ – ljublju ‘I love’), in comparatives (suxoj ‘dry’ / suxo ‘dryly’ – suše ‘drier, more dryly’) and before certain derivational suffixes (noga ‘leg’ – nožka ‘small leg, furniture leg’). Howev...

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...

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...

The Structure of Mandarin Comparatives

In this talk we will explore the syntactic structure of the " phrasal " Mandarin bi comparative. We aim to: • motivate the Mandarin comparative morpheme bi as a v head; • argue against Liu's (1996) PP analysis and Xiang's (2005) DegP analysis on syntactic grounds; • explore a neo-Davidsonian event-based conceptualization of comparison. A comparative generally involves two things to be compared,...