Comparatives and quantifiers

A traditional issue in the analysis of comparatives is whether or not degrees are essential. In the first part of this paper I discuss the traditional analyses that account for comparatives with (Seuren, von Stechow) and without (Klein) degrees, and remind the reader that these are very similar to each other. A more recent issue is how to account for quantifiers in the than-clause. The traditional analyses account well for Negative Polarity Items in comparative clauses, but have problems with conjunctive quantifiers. The strength of the proposals of Larson (1988) and Schwarzchild & Wilkinson (2002), on the other hand, goes exactly in the opposite direction. I will discuss two types of strategies so as to account for both types of quantifiers: (i) one based on the traditional analysis, but by making use of more coarse-grained models or of intervals, (ii) one where comparatives are taken to be ambiguous between the traditional reading and the Larson-reading, and where the actual reading is selected with the help of the strongest meaning hypothesis.