Reevaluating Standard Analyses of Comparison: The View from Malayalam

In this paper, I will argue for an alternative analysis where both the standard marker than and the comparative marker more encode comparative semantics. The evidence for this comes from Malayalam comparatives. Malayalam lacks an adjectival category and uses complex property concept expressions to encode adjectival meaning (Menon 2013, Menon and Pancheva forthcoming). In the absence of adjectives, nominal and verbal comparatives are formed using two different kinds of comparatives. The comparative marker is an adnomial degree modifier along the lines of ‘in addition to’, ‘in excess of’. The comparative semantics is encoded in the semantically non-vacuous than which functions as a quantifier domain adverbial (similar in spirit to Schwarzschild 2014) whereby it restricts the domain of the degree quantifier more.

Building superlatives from property concept expressions

Although the relative versus absolute ambiguity in superlatives is well established, there is no consensus regarding how the comparison classes which gives rise to these ambiguities are determined. Two factors, the LF syntax of -est and focus, have been said to determine the comparison classes. In this paper, I provide novel data from Malayalam, a language without adjectives, which require both a movement theory of superlatives and focus to derive the readings

Building superlatives from property concept expressions

Although the relative versus absolute ambiguity in superlatives is well established, there is no consensus regarding how the comparison classes which gives rise to these ambiguities are determined. Two factors, the LF syntax of -est and focus, have been said to determine the comparison classes. In this paper, I provide novel data from Malayalam, a language without adjectives, which require both a movement theory of superlatives and focus to derive the readings

Modeling Red Tastes: Quality Color Adjectives in English Color-Taste Synesthetic Metaphors

The directionality hypothesis says that low senses [TOUCH, TASTE] usually describe high senses [SOUND, VISION] in synesthetic metaphors, so color-taste metaphors should be inaccessible; however, newer work suggests that some color-taste metaphors are acceptable because of the types of adjectives in them. In this study, we examine how adjectival classification of color terms affects color-taste synesthetic metaphors and provide a frame-based explanation for metaphors that violate the rule. English speakers (N = 116; M = 55, F= 55, NB = 4, N/A = 2) judged acceptability in an online questionnaire of color-taste metaphors with different adjective types. To confirm, we assessed the mean accessibility for the items (1 = accessible, -1 = inaccessible) wherein a mean of zero was the reference level and would suggest no significant influence. The results show that there is a significant color-taste directionality (p < .001) for the metaphors

Statistical Structures in Artificial languages Prime Relative Clause Attachment Biases in English

The phenomenon of syntactic priming is well studied in the literature, but the mechanisms behind it are still under debate. In this study, we trained English-speaking participants in artificial language sequences with dependencies that are either adjacent or non-adjacent. The participants then wrote completions to relative clause (RC) fragments. We found that participants who learn non-adjacent dependencies in the artificial language, exhibit a bias to write high-attachment (non-adjacent) continuations for RCs, when compared to participants in a control condition who exhibit low-attachment (adjacent) biases in RCs. The implications for theories of syntactic priming and its relations to implicit learning are discussed