Hidden nominal structures in Japanese clausal comparatives

Abstract

Recent studies of Japanese clausal comparatives have yielded several competing theoretical views of their syntax and semantics that have different implications for the issue of crosslinguistic variation in comparative constructions. This paper aims at contributing to this debate by offering a novel syntactic analysis of Japanese clausal comparatives. The main proposal is that despite their appearance, Japanese clausal comparatives involve a nominal structure whose nominal head is deleted by a syntactic deletion operation, and therefore are underlyingly phrasal comparatives. It is demonstrated that this analysis explains peculiar syntactic and semantic properties of Japanese (seemingly) clausal comparatives, some of which have been unidentified in the previous literature. The proposed account also allows us to dispense with the previously proposed semantic variation specific to degree constructions, and entertain a more conservative view of crosslinguistic variation where the differences between Japanese-type and English-type comparative constructions are solely attributed to their morphosyntactic properties.