Than clauses as embedded questions

Autor: Nicholas Fleisher
Rok vydání: 2018
Předmět:
Zdroj: Semantics and Linguistic Theory. 28:120
ISSN: 2163-5951
DOI: 10.3765/salt.v28i0.4402
Popis: Quantifiers in comparative than clauses often appear to take scope at the matrix level, a phenomenon that has spawned a large recent literature. Here I reopen an old line of investigation that seeks illumination in the strikingly similar behavior of quantifiers in embedded questions. A novel observation in this connection is that English clausal comparatives support quantificational variability effects. I explore the possibility of treating than clauses as embedded questions, sketching two implementations, and weigh this type of analysis against recent approaches that invoke degree pluralities. I also discuss multiple-wh configurations in clausal comparatives.
Databáze: OpenAIRE