Comparatives without scales: an NSM analysis of English comparative constructions

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Author(s)
Goddard, Cliff
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2013
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This study outlines an analysis of the English comparative construction, framed in the NSM approach to semantics (Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 2002; Goddard ed. 2008). The analysis differs markedly from conventional accounts in that it does not rely on notions of scales, degrees, or standards of comparison. As required, the analysis successfully models the way in which adjectives with equipollent antonyms behave differently from others with respect to their compatibility with comparative statements (Sapir 1944), e.g. why one can say about two cold items 'This one is colder than that one', but not 'This one ...
View more >This study outlines an analysis of the English comparative construction, framed in the NSM approach to semantics (Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 2002; Goddard ed. 2008). The analysis differs markedly from conventional accounts in that it does not rely on notions of scales, degrees, or standards of comparison. As required, the analysis successfully models the way in which adjectives with equipollent antonyms behave differently from others with respect to their compatibility with comparative statements (Sapir 1944), e.g. why one can say about two cold items 'This one is colder than that one', but not 'This one is hotter than that one'. Likewise, it can explain asymmetries with respect to evaluative comparisons of "inherently bad" referents (Cruse 1986), e.g. why 'This year's famine is worse than last year's' is acceptable but 'Last year's famine was better than this year's' is odd. A similar account appears viable for the English superlative construction. The analysis can be termed an "external" one, in the sense that it takes the meaning of the positive term for granted and embeds it into a configuration of semantic primes that explicates the comparative aspect of the meaning.
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View more >This study outlines an analysis of the English comparative construction, framed in the NSM approach to semantics (Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 2002; Goddard ed. 2008). The analysis differs markedly from conventional accounts in that it does not rely on notions of scales, degrees, or standards of comparison. As required, the analysis successfully models the way in which adjectives with equipollent antonyms behave differently from others with respect to their compatibility with comparative statements (Sapir 1944), e.g. why one can say about two cold items 'This one is colder than that one', but not 'This one is hotter than that one'. Likewise, it can explain asymmetries with respect to evaluative comparisons of "inherently bad" referents (Cruse 1986), e.g. why 'This year's famine is worse than last year's' is acceptable but 'Last year's famine was better than this year's' is odd. A similar account appears viable for the English superlative construction. The analysis can be termed an "external" one, in the sense that it takes the meaning of the positive term for granted and embeds it into a configuration of semantic primes that explicates the comparative aspect of the meaning.
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Conference Title
Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society
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Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2013. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Subject
Linguistic Structures (incl. Grammar, Phonology, Lexicon, Semantics)