Course:

Lecturer: Sophie Moracchini

This course is structured around questions of compositionality in the domain of comparison, with an emphasis on the morpho-semantics of comparatives (e.g., the rope is longer than the wire is) and subcomparatives (e.g., the rope is longer than the gap is wide), mainly — but not exclusively — in English. Along the way, we'll familiarize ourselves with core aspects of the grammar of comparison such as the syntax of comparative clauses, ellipsis-resolution, and the semantics of comparative functional elements (-er, less, etc.) and of the predicates they combine with. This will help us derive interesting properties of subcomparatives, including the distribution of cross-polar adjectives and specific entailment patterns associated with negative-antonym subcomparatives.