Skip to main content
Apply Give
Menu

S-Lab - Mal Shah / Coordination and comparatives

A young man and young woman, both in burgundy tops and midnight blue pants, standing outside on a bright blue day, in front of a massive concrete HVAC chimney, painted white.

S-Lab - Mal Shah / Coordination and comparatives

Linguistics Monday, March 2, 2026 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

Monday March 2, Mal Shah leads S-Lab by "Developing an analogy between coordinations and comparatives."

Recently, I've been trying to grapple with apparent category matching in comparative clauses: (i) The desk is longer_adj than the room is deep_adj / (ii) *The desk is long-er_adj than the room measures_v.  I will discuss the (non-)viability of semantic explanations on another occasion (Meaning Meeting; 03/24).  The aim of this meeting is to explore a syntactic analogy to the category matching effects seen in coordinations (the so-called "Law of Coordination of Likes", E. Williams 1981). I will argue - following Hendriks 1990, i.a. - that comparatives are like coordinations in other respects too, including mandating ATB-extraction, and permitting RNR and Gapping. I want to explore also the disanalogies, like the lack of recursion in comparatives, and the (putative) existence of counterexamples to the Law of Coordination of Likes for coordinations (Sag et al 1985, Patejuk and Przepiorkowski 2023 i.a.).”
 

Add to Calendar 03/02/26 12:30:00 03/02/26 13:30:00 America/New_York S-Lab - Mal Shah / Coordination and comparatives

Monday March 2, Mal Shah leads S-Lab by "Developing an analogy between coordinations and comparatives."

Recently, I've been trying to grapple with apparent category matching in comparative clauses: (i) The desk is longer_adj than the room is deep_adj / (ii) *The desk is long-er_adj than the room measures_v.  I will discuss the (non-)viability of semantic explanations on another occasion (Meaning Meeting; 03/24).  The aim of this meeting is to explore a syntactic analogy to the category matching effects seen in coordinations (the so-called "Law of Coordination of Likes", E. Williams 1981). I will argue - following Hendriks 1990, i.a. - that comparatives are like coordinations in other respects too, including mandating ATB-extraction, and permitting RNR and Gapping. I want to explore also the disanalogies, like the lack of recursion in comparatives, and the (putative) existence of counterexamples to the Law of Coordination of Likes for coordinations (Sag et al 1985, Patejuk and Przepiorkowski 2023 i.a.).”
 

 false