Phrasal comparatives in Japanese: A mea- sure function-based analysis

There has recently been much discussion about the proper analysis of Japanese comparatives (cf., e.g., Beck et al. 2004; Oda 2008; Hayashishita 2009; Kawahara 2009; Kennedy 2009). Most of the discussion in the previous literature centers around the question of whether the semantics of Japanese comparatives should be modelled on the analysis of English comparatives. Beck et al. (2004) have argued against assimilating Japanese comparatives with English ones based on the observation that Japanese does not have overt comparative morphology and have proposed an analysis of Japanese comparatives in which the standard of comparison is determined contextually. Kennedy (2009) and Kawahara (2009), on the other hand, propose analyses of comparatives in Japanese in which the standard of comparison is explicitly provided by the yori phrase in the semantics along the lines of the direct analysis of comparatives (Heim, 1985). A fully adequate analysis of comparatives should interact with other phenomena pertaining to gradable predicates such as measure phrases and degree modifiers. It turns out, however, that none of the previous analyses address this question explicitly. In this paper, I propose an analysis of phrasal comparatives in Japanese in terms of ‘derived’ measure functions, an idea informally sketched by Kennedy and McNally (2005) and more explicitly worked out by Kennedy and Levin (2008) (see also Rotstein and Winter (2003) for a similar idea). It will be shown that the proposed analysis retains the advantages of the direct analysis by Kennedy (2009) and Kawahara (2009) over Beck et al.’s (2004) original proposal regarding the basic semantic properties of phrasal comparatives in Japanese, while at the same time enabling a more straightforward analysis of cases in which comparatives interact with other phenomena. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the relevant data to be accounted for, where it will be shown that phrasal comparatives in Japanese behave like minimum standard predicates (i.e. predicates whose meanings are determined with reference to scales with minimum endpoints) in all relevant respects. Section 3 spells out