Comparison in Turkish: A Rediscovery of the Phrasal Comparative

Abstract

This paper argues that clausal comparatives are completely unattested in Turkish and thus verifies the need for a genuinely phrasal analysis of comparison constructions in this language. It develops such a syntactic and semantic analysis that differs considerably from ‘standard’ analyses commonly suggested for languages like English and also shows that this phrasal analysis derives the correct predictions for the scopal behaviour of quantified DPs and the comparative operator. It furthermore argues that phrasal comparatives are the ‘basic’ and potentially universal type of comparatives, in contrast to what has been hypothesised previously, and speculates on how this phrasal analysis might even be applied to solve problems for analysis with English comparatives.