Between-noun comparisons

Abstract

Adjectives are typically felicitous in within-predicate comparisons— constructions of the form ‘X is more A than y’, as in This is bigger than that, but are often infelicitous in between-predicate comparisons—‘X is more A than (y is) B’, as in *Tweety is bigger than (it is) heavy. Nouns, by contrast, exhibit the inverse pattern. The challenge is to account for the felicity of between-noun comparisons, such as more a duck than a goose, while capturing the infelicity of within-noun comparisons, such as #This bird is more a duck than that one. Postulating even only ad hoc, meta-linguistic gradable interpretations for noun to capture the meaning of between-noun comparisons results in wrong predictions for within-noun comparisons and other gradable constructions (#very duck; too duck). To address this challenge, the paper exploits the psychological notion of a contrast-set. The solution correctly predicts inference patterns and truth value judgments.