The ability to make comparisons between objects according to the amount or degree to which they possess some property (such as height, brightness, beauty, etc.) is a basic component of human cognition. Natural languages reflect this fact: all languages have words whose meanings encode gradable concepts (such as English adjectives like 'tall' and 'bright' as well as amount terms like 'many' and 'few'), and all languages have specialized comparative constructions that are used to express orderings between two objects with respect to the degree or amount to which they possess some property. Comparatives do not have a uniform structure across the world's languages, however, and in fact appear to show an unusually wide range of cross-linguistic variation. Whether this variation reflects deeper differences in the way languages encode comparison (and speakers of languages conceptualize it), or obscures an underlying uniformity at a more abstract level of semantic representation is unknown, because comparatives have not yet been the focus of a comprehensive and detailed cross-linguistic investigation that goes beyond superficial descriptions of patterns.
This project will respond to this gap in our knowledge by developing a comprehensive research program designed to provide detailed and in-depth cross-linguistic analysis of comparative constructions. In particular, it will focus on the following set of questions: What is responsible for variation in the structure of comparative constructions across different languages? Does this variability indicate a corresponding variability in the underlying semantics of comparative constructions, or will we find evidence that the underlying semantics of comparison is universal? If the former, what is the range of semantic variation? If the latter, what are the universal semantic features of comparative constructions and gradable concept terms more generally, and what syntactic, morphological or pragmatic/functional factors give rise to the observed variation? Finally, what does the specific case of comparison tell us about the nature syntactic and semantic variation more generally? In extending our understanding of the nature of syntactic and semantic variation, this project will contribute to our understanding of an even more fundamental question about the relation between language and cognition: Are universal categories of meaning/cognition correlated with universal structures of language, or do different languages make use of different grammatical strategies to express the same category/meaning? Given that the ability to order objects along scalar dimensions is a basic feature of human cognition, a deeper understanding of the nature of variation in the expression of comparison will provide important insights on this central question about language and cognition.
