Mereological Comparatives in Delineation Semantics

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a new logical analysis of nominal comparatives (i.e. sentences as in (1)) within the Delineation Semantics (DelS) approach to gradability and comparison (Klein, 1980, among many others).

(1) More linguists came to the party than stayed home to study.

Along with the Degree Semantics (DegS) framework (see Kennedy, 1997, for a summary), DelS is one of the dominant logical frameworks for analyzing the meaning of gradable constituents of the adjectival syntactic category; however, there has been very little work done investigating the application of this framework to the analysis of gradability outside the adjectival domain. This state of affairs distinguishes the DelS framework from its DegS counterpart, where such questions have been investigated in great deal since the beginning of the 21st century. Nevertheless, it has been observed (for example, by Doetjes et al. (2011)) that there is nothing inherently adjectival about the way that the interpretations of scalar predicates are calculated in DelS, and therefore that there is enormous potential for this approach to shed light on the nature of gradability and comparison in the nominal and verbal domains. This paper gives the first attempt at realizing this potential within a Mereological extension of a (simplified) version of Klein (1980)’s system.