Abstract
In this paper, we present a striking parallel between Greek and Korean in the formation and interpretation of metalinguistic comparatives. The initial observation is that both languages show an empirical contrast between ordinary and metalinguistic comparatives realized in two places: (a) in the form of a designated metalinguistic comparative MORE, and (b) in the form of THAN employed. We propose (building on earlier ideas in Giannakidou and Stavrou 2009; Giannakidou and Yoon 2009) that the metalinguistic comparative is subjective and attitudinal, i.e. it introduces the point of view of an individual towards a sentence—and argue that the individual expresses invariably an attitude of preference: she prefers one sentence (the sentence itself, or the proposition it expresses) in a given context over another. The preference may come out as completely negative in certain cases, and this is manifested as yet another MORE lexicalization in Korean (charari), which selects nuni-THAN, which itself carries a negative expressive index (in the sense of Potts 2007b), we will claim. Expressive negativity is not equivalent to negation in syntax, as nuni alone cannot license NPIs that need negation.
If our analysis is correct, it has one important implication that goes beyond just the metalinguistic comparatives in the individual languages we are considering. It allows the generalization that metalinguistic functions in language are indeed part of the grammar. In particular, they are reflexes of grammaticalization of perspective and subjective mode, on a par with predicates of personal taste discussed by Lasersohn (2005, 2008, 2009), mood choice, and similar phenomena. In comparatives, subjective mode is manifested as an attitude of preference, with possible addition of expressive meaning.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Bhatt, Rajesh, and Roumyana Pancheva. 2004. Late merger of degree clauses. Linguistic Inquiry 35: 1–45.
Bresnan, Joan. 1973. Syntax of the comparative clause construction in English. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 275–343.
Canstant, Noah, Christopher Davis, Christopher Potts, and Florian Schwarz. 2009. The pragmatics of expressive content: Evidence from large corpora. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 33: 5–21.
Choe, Jae-Woong. 2004. Obligatory honorification and the honorific feature. Studies in Generative Grammar 14: 545–559.
Choi, Incheol. 2003. A constraint-based approach to Korean partial honorific agreement. In The role of agreement in natural language: TLS 5 Proceedings, ed. William Earl Griffin, 157–166. Austin: Department of Linguistics.
Dictionary of the National Institute of Korean Language. 2008. National Institute of Korean Language.
Drozd, Kenneth F. 1995. Child English pre-sentential negation as metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. Journal of Child Language 22: 583–610.
Embick, David. 2007. Blocking effects and analytic/synthetic alternations. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 25: 1–37.
Farkas, Donka F. 1992. On the semantics of subjunctive complements. In Romance languages and linguistic theory, eds. Paul Hirschbühler and Konrad Koerner, 69–104. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1999. Affective dependencies. Linguistics and Philosophy 22: 367–421.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2000. Negative…concord? Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18: 457–523.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2001. The meaning of free choice. Linguistics and Philosophy 24: 659–735.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2006. Only, emotive factives, and the dual nature of polarity dependency. Language 82: 575–603.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2011. Positive polarity items and negative polarity items: Variation, licensing, and compositionality. In Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, eds. Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Giannakidou, Anastasia, and Melita Stavrou. 2009. Metalinguistic comparatives and negation in Greek. In Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Greek syntax and semantics (MIT working papers in linguistics 57), eds. Claire Halpert, Jeremy Hartman, and David Hill, 57–74. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Giannakidou, Anastasia, and Suwon Yoon. 2009. Metalinguistic functions and the expressive dimension in Greek and Korean: Attitude semantics, expressive meaning and NPI licensing. In Proceedings of the 13 th Sinn und Bedeutung, eds. Ljudmila Geist, Klaus von Heusinger, Hans Kamp, Udo Klein, Fabienne Martin, Edgar Onea, Arndt Riester, and Torgrim Solstad, 141–156. Stuttgart: Online Publikationsverbund der Universität Stuttgart (OPUS).
Giannakidou, Anastasia, and Suwon Yoon. 2010. No NPI licensing in clausal comparatives. In Proceedings of the 46th Chicago Linguistic Society, eds. Timothy Grinsell, Adam Baker, Julia Thomas, Rebekah Baglini, and Jon Keane. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Han, Eunjoo. 1991. Honorification in Korean. Ms. Stanford University.
Hankamer, Jorge. 1973. Why there are two than’s in English. In Papers from the 9th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, eds. Claudia Corum, Cedric Smith-Stark, and Ann Weiser, 179–191. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
Heim, Irene. 1992. Presupposition projection and the semantics of attitude verbs. Journal of Semantics 9: 183–221.
Heim, Irene. 2000. Degree operators and scope. In Proceedings of SALT X, eds. Brendan Jackson and Tanya Matthews, 40–64. Ithaca: CLC Publications.
Hila-Markopoulou, Despoina. 2007. Apo tin exelixi ton grammatikon kategorion: i periptosi tu sigkritiku para [From the evolution of grammatical categories: the comparative para]. Talk at the Linguistics Department, University of Ioannina, Greece.
Holton, David, Peter Mackridge, and Irene Philippaki-Warburton. 1997. Greek: A comprehensive grammar of the modern language. London: Routledge.
Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Horn, Laurence R. 2000. Pick a theory (Not just any theory): Indiscriminatives and the free-choice indefinite. In Negation and polarity: Syntactic and semantic perspectives, eds. Laurence R. Horn and Yasuhiko Kato, 147–192. Oxford: University Press.
Horn, Laurence R. 2002. Assertoric inertia and NPI-licensing. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS 38), eds. Mary Andronis, Erin Debenport, Anne Pycha, and Keiko Yoshimura, 55–82. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
Joe, Jieun, and Chungmin Lee. 2002. A ‘removal’ type of negative predicates. In Proceedings of the 10th Japanese Korean linguistics conference. CSLI Publication.
Kennedy, Chris. 1997. Projecting the adjective. PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Kennedy, Chris. 2007. Modes of comparison. In Papers from the 43rd annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, eds. Malcolm Elliott, James Kirby, Osamu Sawada, and Eleni Staraki, Suwon Yoon. Chicago: Chicago Linguitics Society.
Kim, Jong-Bok, and Jaehyung Yang. 2005. Parsing Korean honorification in a typed feature structure grammar. Paper presented at CLS 41, April 2005.
Kim, Jong-Bok, and Peter Sells. 2007. Korean honorification: A kind of expressive meaning. Journal of East Asian Linguistics Journal 16: 303–336.
Larson, Richard. 1988. Scope of comparatives. Linguistics & Philosophy 11: 1–26.
Lasersohn, Peter. 1999. Pragmatic halos. Language 75: 522–571.
Lasersohn, Peter. 2005. Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy 28: 643–86.
Lasersohn, Peter. 2008. Quantification and perspective in relativist semantics. Paper presented at the University of Chicago Compositionality Workshop, May 2008.
Lasersohn, Peter. 2009. Relative truth, speaker commitment, and control of implicit arguments. Synthese 166: 359–374.
Lechner, Winfried. 2007. Comments on ‘metalinguistic contrast in the grammar of Greek. Handout, Workshop on Greek Syntax and Semantics, MIT.
Lechner, Winfried. 2009. Metametacomparatives: Comments on “Metalinguistic contrast in the grammar of Greek. In Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Greek syntax and semantics (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 57), eds. Claire Halpert, Jeremy Hartman, and David Hill, 75–90. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lee, Iksop, and Robert Ramsey. 2000. The Korean language. Albany: State University of New York Press.
McCawley, Jim. 1968. The role of semantics in a grammar. In Universals in linguistic theory, eds. Emmon Bach, and Robert Harms, 124–69. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
McCawley, Jim. 1988. The syntactic phenomena of English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merchant, Jason. 2009. Phrasal and clausal comparatives in Greek and the abstractness of syntax. Journal of Greek Linguistics 9: 134–164.
Morzycki, Marcin. 2009. Metalinguistic Comparison in an alternative semantics for imprecision. In Proceedings of NELS 38, eds. Muhammad Abdurrahman, Anisa Schardl, and Martin Walkow. Amherst: GLSA Publications.
Parl, Byung-Soo. 1992. The semantic and pragmatic nature of honorific agreement in Korean: An information-based approach. Ms., Kyung-Hee University, South Korea, and Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Park, Eun-Hae. 2009. Free choice and wh-indeterminate quantification in Korean. PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago.
Pollard, Carl, and Ivan Sag. 1994. Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: CSLI Publications.
Postal, Paul. 2002. The structure of one type of American English vulgar minimizer. In Skeptical linguistic essays. New York: Oxford University Press.
Potts, Christopher, and Shigeto Kawahara. 2004. Japanese honorifics as emotive definite descriptions. In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 14, eds. Kazuha Watanabe, and Robert B. Young, 235–254. Ithaca: CLC Publications.
Potts, Christopher. 2005. The logic of conventional implicature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Potts, Christopher. 2007a. The dimensions of quotation. In Direct compositionality, eds. Chris Barker, and Pauline Jacobson, 405–431. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Potts, Christopher. 2007b. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 7: 1–32.
Rullmann, Hotze. 1995. Maximality in wh-quantification. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA.
Stalnaker, Robert. 1984. Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stavrou, Melita. 1982. Some remarks on comparative complements in Modern Greek [in Greek]. In Studies in Greek linguistics, 73–105. Thessaloniki: Kyrjakides.
Stephenson, Tamina. 2007. Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy 30: 487–525.
Villalta, Elisabeth. 2008. Mood and gradability: An investigation of the subjunctive mood in Spanish. Linguistics and Philosophy 31: 467–522.
Von Stechow, Arnim. 1984. Comparing semantic theories of comparison. Journal of Semantics 3: 1–79.
Yang, In-Seok. 1973. Semantics of delimiters. Language Research 9: 84–121.
Yoon, James. 2005. Non-morphological determination of nominal affix ordering in Korean. In Clitic and affix combinations: Theoretical perspectives, eds. Lorie Heggie, and Francisco Ordóñez, 239–282. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Zwarts, Frans. 1995. Nonveridical contexts. Linguistic Analysis 25: 286–312.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Giannakidou, A., Yoon, S. The subjective mode of comparison: Metalinguistic comparatives in Greek and Korean. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 29, 621–655 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9133-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9133-5