Invisible Degree Nominals in Japanese Clausal

English comparative sentences fall into two kinds: phrasal and clausal comparatives. Phrasal comparatives involve a single DP in the accusative case as the complement of than, while clausal comparatives involve a structure as big as a full clause. (1) a. John is smarter than her. Phrasal comparative b. John is smarter than she is (smart). Clausal comparative In the literature, two competing views are advocated on the syntax of these two types of comparative sentences. Some researchers argue that they are underlyingly differentiated, whereas others disagree and contend that phrasal comparatives are always derived from corresponding clausal ones, e.g. (1a) is derived from (1b) (Bhatt and Takahashi to appear, Hankamer 1973, Heim 1985, Lechner 2001, 2004, Merchant 2006, Seuren 1973 among many others). According to the latter view, then, underlyingly phrasal comparatives do not exist in English. This paper has nothing to add to this debate about English comparatives, but has a lot to say about Japanese comparatives. Japanese, similarly, has the same two kinds of comparative sentences, at least superficially and also there is disagreement among scholars as to whether one is derived from the other. For the reasons we will see in Section 3.1, it is not possible to construct a minimal pair parallel to the English examples in (1).