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Structural Choice in Spanish Clausal Comparison*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

John Knowles
John Knowles*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Extract

1. A not insignificant problem of Spanish syntax is that of relating the subdeletion sentence (1) to its comparative-deletion congener (2)

  • (1) Juan comió más manzanas que peras había traído.

    Juan ate more apples than he had brought pears.

  • (2) Juan comió más manzanas de las que había traído.

    Juan ate more apples than he had brought.

At first glance there appears to be little that is problematic and the solutions that have been proposed for English seem readily applicable; under such an analysis (as we shall see below) both sentences are held to be structurally identical, but subject to a more or less extensive deletion rule in accord with the extent of the identity of lexical elements in the compared constituents of the matrix and subordinate clause.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , Spring 1984 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1984

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Footnotes

*

The research for this paper was supported by the Canada Council Research Grant No. 451-790 644.

References

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