Between-Noun Comparisons

Adjectives are typically felicitous in within-predicate comparisons—constructions of the form ‘X is more A than y’, as in This is bigger than that, but are often infelicitous in between-predicate comparisons—constructions of the form ‘X is more A than (y is) B’, as in *Tweety is bigger than (it is) heavy. Nouns, by contrast, exhibit the inverse pattern. The challenge is to account for their felicity in between-predicate comparisons, as, for instance, in This bird is more a duck than a goose, while capturing their infelicity in within-predicate comparisons, as in #This bird is more (of) a duck than that one. Postulating either semantic gradability, or even only ad-hoc, metalinguistic gradable interpretations for noun to capture the meaning of between-noun comparisons results in wrong predictions for within-noun comparisons and other gradable constructions (#very duck; too duck). The paper presents a solution to this problem, using the psychological notion of a contrast-set. The solution correctly predicts inference patterns and truth value judgments pertaining to between noun constructions. 1 Comparison constructions with Adjectives and Nouns