The Comparative Conditional Construction in English, German, and Chinese

McCawley, James D.

doi:10.3765/bls.v14i0.1791

Cited by 61 publications

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“…As McCawley (1989) shows in (4), the second and fifth constituents of the correlative conditional exhibit the complete range of ordinary comparative morphology; -er on short stems, more on long stems, and suppletion with good, bad, will, badly, much, many, little.…”

Section: Grammar: Uniformity and Probabilitymentioning

confidence: 98%

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A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation

1996

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Section: Grammar: Uniformity and Probabilitymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…As an example of a construction and the use of inheritance to capture generalizations, consider the CORRELATIVE CONDITIONAL construction described by Fillmore (1986) and and McCawley (1989), which models sentences like (2):…”

Section: Grammar: Uniformity and Probabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation

1996

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“…They do not involve a single pair of cases related by means of their respective differentials, but involve multiple pairs of such cases. What is characterized in the literature (e.g., McCawley 1988, Beck 1997 as the conditionality of certain comparative correlatives is, under this analysis, just the fact that they correlate sets of cases. The basic schema for the interpretation of comparative correlatives is provided in (21) below.…”

Section: Comparative Correlatives As Anaphora To Differentialsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…This version, which builds on the informal proposal in McCawley (1988), is preferable because of its closeness to the surface form of (4) (or its English counterpart). Moreover, as far as I can see, it is not subject to the 'functional' problem raised in Beck (1997: 257 et seqq).…”

Section: Conditional Comparative and Equative Correlativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Comparative Correlatives as Anaphora to Differentials

Brașoveanu

2008

SALT

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The two goals of this paper are (i) to establish that there are comparative correlatives that are not comparative conditionals and that the semantics of such correlatives crucially involves a relation (possibly the identity relation) between differentials (against much of the previous literature, e.g., McCawley 1988, Beck 1997 and (ii) to argue that a unified analysis should be given for such non-conditional, differential-based comparative (and equative) correlatives and the more familiar, conditional-like comparative correlatives.Correlatives are "biclausal topic-comment structures [. . . ] [in which] the dependent clause introduces one or more topical referents to be commented on by the matrix clause, where each topical referent must be picked up by -correlated withan anaphoric proform." (Bittner 2001). Differentials, e.g., 2 cm in the comparative Gabby is 2 cm taller than Linus, specify the difference between two measures, e.g., between Gabby's and Linus's heights. Non-Conditional Comparative and Equative CorrelativesThe first point is established by the existence of comparative correlatives with overt than-phrases (which are usually not acceptable in English) like the one in (1) mother.the 'The brother is taller than the sister by a certain amount and the father is taller than the mother by the same amount.' Intuitively, sentence (1) is true iff (i) the brother is taller than the sister and the father is taller than the mother, that is, there is no conditionality (no'if the brother is taller than the sister . . . ' kind of interpretation), and (ii) the difference in height between the brother and the sister is the same as the difference in height between I am grateful to Daniel Altshuler, Pranav Anand, Rajesh Bhatt, Cleo Condoravdi, Sam Cumming, Donka Farkas, Simona Herdan, Slavica Kochovska, Sophia Malamud, Megan Moodie, Roumyana Pancheva, Asya Pereltsvaig, Octavian Popescu, Jessica Rett, Ivan Sag, Oana Sȃvescu, Roger Schwarzschild, two SALT XVIII reviewers and the 9 th Stanford Semantics Fest and SALT XVIII audiences for comments and / or data and / or judgments. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Correlatives

Brașoveanu¹

2012

Language and Linguist. Compass

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The paper reviews the semantics and pragmatics of correlatives across various ontological domains (temporal, modal, individual and degree domains), focusing mostly on Indo-European languages. Taking correlatives in the individual domain as a case study, the paper then argues that their interpretation, in particular the variability of the uniqueness effects exhibited by correlatives, is due to their mixed referential and quantificational nature. The account involves an articulated notion of quantification consisting of both (discourse) referential components and non-referential/ quantificational components -thus bringing together previous analyses that took either the referential or the quantificational route. The variable uniqueness effects emerge out of the interaction between (i) the semantics of wh-indefinites, singular anaphors and habitual morphology and (ii) the pragmatics of quantification, which allows for the selection of different levels of 'zoomin' on the quantified-over objects.

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The Comparative Conditional Construction in English, German, and Chinese

Abstract: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1988), pp. 176-187

Cited by 61 publications

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A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation

A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation

Comparative Correlatives as Anaphora to Differentials

Correlatives

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