Proportional comparatives and relative scales

Abstract

This paper examines the proportional interpretation of comparatives such as More residents of Ithaca than New York City know their neighbors, taking these as the starting point for an investigation of relative or proportional measurement more generally. Two mechanisms for deriving mappings from individuals to degrees of proportion are considered, the first based on posited proportional entries for many/few, the second involving proportional measure functions. It is shown that only the measure function approach adequately accounts for the distribution of proportional expressions and proportional interpretations. A further consequence is to eliminate the need to analyze words such as many as lexically ambiguous.