Typology of Comparatives

Typology of Comparatives Satomi Ito Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences, Ochanomizu University, 2-1-1 Ohtsuka, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112-8610, Japan ito.satomi@ocha.ac.jp Abstract. It is well-known that an adjective is not a universal part of speech. As pointed out in the previous researches, many oceanic languages do not have a morphologically distinguished adjective class. The only criteria which distinguish adjectives from verbs and nouns could be whether they appear in comparative construction or not. However, even comparative construction is not universal. Whereas most languages have a specific morpheme to construct comparatives like inflection, some languages do not. In this paper I investigate various languages in the Pacific Asia region and discuss the difference in comparative construction in the framework of formal semantics. I suggest two parameters to distinguish the four language groups and propose a new typology of comparative construction. Keywords: Oceanic languages, Comparatives, Formal semantics, Typology 1. Introduction It is well-known that many oceanic languages have no adjective class which is distinguishable from noun and verb classes (Wetzer, 1996). The only criteria which distinguish adjectives from nouns and verbs could be comparative constructions (Dixon, 2004). However, comparative construction is not universal. Some languages in Papua New Guinea do not have any comparative morpheme or any comparative-specific structure. In this paper I focus on the comparative forms of various languages in the Pacific Asia region and suggest a new typology of comparatives in the framework of formal semantics. The structure of the paper is as follows: in section 2, I summarize the previous studies on semantics of comparatives and define the denotation of adjectives; in section 3, I show the data from various languages in the Pacific Asia region and classify them into four groups depending on the morphological/syntactic markedness; in section 4, I show how to analyze each type of comparative construction in the framework presented in section 2; in section 5, I show that two parameters are relevant to the classification of adjectival systems. 2. Semantics of Comparatives The denotation of an adjective is property, i.e. an expression of type <e,t>. In comparative construction, however, adjectives need to be abstracted over degrees, because what is compared is the degree of property of more than one object. I call this process degree abstraction and define the degree abstraction operator as follows: 1) Degree Abstraction operator Π is a function from expressions of type <e,t> to <e <d,t>> Π<<e,t>, <e,<d,t>>> = λA<e,t>λx<e>λd<d> [RA(d)(x)] where the domain of type <d> is a set of degrees and RA is a function which relate objects to degrees on the scale of A. 197 22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 197–206 Ex. λx<e> [tall(x)] → λx<e>λd<d> [Rtall(d)(x)] After an adjective undergoes the process of degree abstraction, we obtain a function from individuals to a set of degrees. An adjective tall now means a set of degrees which the individual x has on the scale of tallness. However, this procedure is not enough for an adjective to be comparative. When we compare two …

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