Dr. Peter Alrenga
The interpretation of modals and individual quantifiers occurring inside the comparative clause has proven a vexing problem for semantic analyses of the comparative. Consider, for instance, the necessity modals 'supposed (to)' and 'have (to)', which display an intriguing split when they appear in comparative clauses. (Scenari John wants to be a fighter pilot. Air Force regulations require all jet pilots to be between 5'4" and 6'5" tall.) (1) John is taller than he is supposed to be. (2) John is taller than he has to be. According to (1), John's height exceeds the maximum permissible height, i.e., he is too tall to comply with Air Force regulations. Example (2), on the other hand, expresses something rather different. According to (2), John's height exceeds the minimum permissible height, i.e., he could be less tall and still comply with Air Force regulations. Previous approaches to this contrast suffer from one of the following problems: (i) failure to account for the >-max reading in (1), (ii) failure to account for the >-min reading in (2), or (iii) inability to predict which reading will be triggered by a certain modal/quantifier. I develop a novel syntactic and semantic treatment of the comparative clause and show how it allows for an understanding of the difference between (1) and (2) in terms of an independent difference between the two modals, namely their scope relative to negation. The analysis correctly captures the observed distribution of readings and extends to other modals and quantifiers in the comparative clause, while avoiding certain problematic predictions of previous accounts. The analysis also provides a fresh perspective on the long-held intuition that the logical form of comparison somehow incorporates a negation.
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