eprintid: 1461349 rev_number: 46 eprint_status: archive userid: 608 dir: disk0/01/46/13/49 datestamp: 2015-11-18 11:41:12 lastmod: 2020-02-12 23:33:27 status_changed: 2015-11-18 11:41:12 type: article metadata_visibility: show item_issues_count: 0 creators_name: Sudo, Y title: Hidden nominal structures in Japanese clausal comparatives ispublished: pub divisions: UCL divisions: A01 divisions: B02 divisions: C07 divisions: D05 divisions: F72 keywords: Japanese, Comparative construction, Degree nominals, Noun deletion, Semantic variation note: © The Author(s) 2014. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 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. date: 2015-02 official_url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10831-014-9125-7 vfaculties: VFBRS oa_status: green full_text_type: pub language: eng primo: open primo_central: open_green verified: verified_manual elements_source: crossref elements_id: 1011684 doi: 10.1007/s10831-014-9125-7 lyricists_name: Sudo, Yasutada lyricists_id: YSUDO56 full_text_status: public publication: Journal of East Asian Linguistics volume: 24 number: 1 pagerange: 1 - 51 issn: 0925-8558 citation: Sudo, Y; (2015) Hidden nominal structures in Japanese clausal comparatives. Journal of East Asian Linguistics , 24 (1) 1 - 51. 10.1007/s10831-014-9125-7 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-014-9125-7>. Green open access document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1461349/10/Sudo_Hidden%20nominal%20structures%20in%20Japanese%20clausal%20comparatives.pdf