Comparisons of equality across languages: Degrees, manners, and kinds as grammatical primitives

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It is well known in the literature on comparisons of inequality (comparatives e.g., Kim is taller than Tom) that there is significant variation in their morphosyntax and semantic interpretations; less well-studied are comparisons of equality (henceforth equatives e.g., Kim is as tall as Tom). In this talk, we examine equative constructions across different languages (English, German, Dutch, and Mandarin Chinese) and how they vary morpho-syntactically and morpho-semantically. We observe that there is at least one significant dimension along which this construction differs across languages, namely, whether the parameter of comparison is marked with a parameter marker (PM). We show that there is both intra- and inter-language variation in whether adjectival and verbal parameters are marked with PMs. Notably, this difference in the presence of PMs leads to a different distribution of degree versus manner readings in equative constructions, i.e., whether the construction is equating measures of an entity possessing some gradable property or the way in which some particular eventuality is carried out or instantiated. Given these observations, we argue that different types of semantic primitives are required in our semantic ontology for any adequate analysis and briefly outline a formal compositional semantics for equatives across these four languages.

Speaker: Dr Yu Jianrong

Yu Jianrong is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology (CRISSP) at KU Leuven Brussels in Belgium, working under the KU Leuven-funded project Comparatives Under the Microscope. Previously, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at National University of Singapore, a part-time lecturer at Nanyang Technological University’s Department of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, and an adjunct lecturer at The University of Arizona’s Department of Linguistics. Jianrong received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at The University of Arizona in 2020, with broad interests in syntax, semantics, morphology, and how these grammatical modules interface, and has worked on and published work examining this broad question through topics like comparison constructions, degree semantics, event and argument structure, and the division of labor between the lexicon and syntax in building verbal meaning.