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More on the English comparative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Rodney Huddleston
Rodney Huddleston
Affiliation:
Department of General Linguistics, University College, London W.C.1
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Extract

1. In the last few years there have been three papers published devoted wholly or largely to a study of the English comparative construction: Lees (1961); Smith (1961); and Pilch (1965) The focus of attention has been the structure of what, following Pilch, I shall call the comparative expansion (the constituent introduced by than or as), rather than the morphology of the compared adjective or adverb. It is not surprising that so much interest should be shown in this construction at a time when one of the main concerns of linguists is to make their syntactic descriptions maximally explicit. For as this was not the aim of traditional grammarians, they had relatively little to say on the structure of the comparative expansion, implicitly assuming doubtless that such ungrammaticalities as

(1) *John bought a bigger car than Mary went home yesterday can be ruled out by commonsense, semantics, or logic.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , April 1967 , pp. 91 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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References

REFERENCES

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. (1966). Some notes on ‘deep’ grammar. JL 2. 57–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, J. J. & Postal, P. M. (1964). An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Lees, R. B. (1961). Grammatical analysis of the English comparative construction. Word 17. 171–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pilch, H. (1965). Comparative constructions in English. Lg. 41. 37–58.Google Scholar
Smith, C. S. (1961). A class of complex modifiers in English. Lg. 37. 342–65.Google Scholar