Natasha Thalluri (Göttingen)
The implications of Type Economy for the semantics of comparatives
The idea of Type Economy is often discussed in the context of conjunction, going back to Partee and Rooth (1983) who observed that all the type lifted variants of "and" are derivable from the sentential and. This has led to the view that sentences where "and" conjoins non-sentential expressions in the surface string actually have covert clausal syntax. To that end, Hirsch (2017) proposes that cross-categorial operators such "and" and "or" always combine with expressions of type t regardless of the surface structure, and all type shifted meanings of these operators are unavailable.A similar constraint on higher typed meanings is Heim(2017)'s Type Economy Principle(TEP) which states that if some function F is definable in terms of a shorter function F′, then F is not a possible meaning in natural language. The goal of this talk is to extend the discussion of Type Economy to the domain of comparatives. Would the comparative have the same semantics in a sentence like "John runs faster than Mary" as opposed to "John runs faster than Mary does"? Based on the surface structure, in the first case, the comparative takes two DPs and a gradable predicate as its arguments, while in the second, it takes two sets of degrees as its arguments. However, since the higher typed 3-place phrasal comparative is derivable from the 2-place clausal comparative, TEP blocks the higher typed meaning. I will illustrate how this constraint plays out in the case of English comparatives, and discuss data from Hindi comparatives that poses a problem for such a formulation of Type Economy.