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<Paper uid="P88-1007">
  <Title>PARSING AND INTERPRETING COMPARATIVES</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="49" end_page="50" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
2. PREVIOUS WORK
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The traditional viewpoint has been to explain non-clausal comparatives by means of deletion rules; the first detailed account based on this idea was (Bresnan 73), which strongly influenced most work in the area during the following ten years.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Recently, however, other researchers have pointed out problems with Bresnan's approach; a very thorough and detailed criticism appears in (Pinkham 85) 1, which has been our main theoretical source. Pinkham gives examples of a wide range of constructions which are difficult or impossible to explain in terms of deletion phenomena, and suggests instead an approach in which at least some comparative constructions are base-generated phrasal and then interpreted using a rule which she calls &amp;quot;distributive copying&amp;quot;. The following example 2 shows how the scheme works in practice. Sentence la) receives the logical form lb): la) I invited more men than women  (The object of INVITED is the base generated phrasal). After distributive copying, this becomes lc): lc) MORE I ql (INVITED ql men), q2 (INVITED q2 women)\] This manoevre, replacing syntactic deletion rules with interpretative copying operations, seems to us very powerful, and (although we formulate it in a rather different way) is one of the central ideas in our own treatment of comparatives. We have in fact taken it even further than Pinkham, who keeps the verb deletion rule of &amp;quot;Cellipsis&amp;quot; to explain some comparative constructions: in the account presented below in section 4, we get rid of the deletion rules completely and use only interpretative methods.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this context, it is interesting to look at Levin's LFG-based work on sluidng constructions (Levin 82). Levin presents a variety of arguments to support her claim that sluicing is not a c-structure phenomenon (i.e. not elliptic in nature), but rather explainable at f-structure level (i.e. in some sense related to a semantic copying operation). The differences between sluicing and comparative ellipsis are sufficiently great that this cannot in itself be said to prove anything, but it is none the less indicative of the way in which linguists are thinking about these problems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In SNACK-85, which uses a framework based on that in (Pereira 83), we perform copying operations on &amp;quot;quanttrees&amp;quot;, a level of structure which can loosely be compared with Chomskian logical form or LFG's f-structures.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Viewed in this light, we claim that our treatment of non-clausal comparison (which at first glance might seem somewhat ad hoc) is in fact fairly weUrelated to current tendencies in theoretical linguistics.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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