BEGIN:VCALENDAR PRODID:-//Grails iCalendar plugin//NONSGML Grails iCalendar plugin//EN VERSION:2.0 CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260405T170558Z DTSTART;TZID=Australia/Melbourne:20230720T150000 DTEND;TZID=Australia/Melbourne:20230720T170000 SUMMARY:Packaging comparative thoughts UID:20260406T005746Z-iCalPlugin-Grails@philevents-web-f5d4878dd-4s97k TZID:Australia/Melbourne LOCATION:250 Victoria Parade\, East Melbourne\, Australia\, 3002 DESCRIPTION:

What shape do thoughts about one thing's being greater than another take? And what are they about? To answer these questions\, I turn to linguistic typology. The space of realized possibilities in how languages give form to comparative thoughts is far from universal: some languages have translational equivalents of English \;Ann is 2 inches taller than Bill is\, others don't. Of those that don't\, some can nonetheless form \;Ann is taller than Bill is\; others\, only \;Ann is taller than Bill\; and\, some have no correspondents of forms like \;taller \;at all. However\, not anything goes: crosslinguistic study in the morphology\, syntax\, and semantics of comparatives has uncovered surprising structure in this variation that is well-captured by a series of "implicational universals". In my view\, such patterning teaches us an important lesson about how the smallest units of meaning&mdash\;morphemes&mdash\;encode sense. To act on this lesson\, we require a theory of how "meanings" are quantified\, in order to restrict how much meaning a morpheme can have. I describe the typology and a proposed theoretical constraint\, giving a toy semantics of the relevant derivational relationships. Specifically\, I argue that comparative forms encode at least three classes of derivationally-related thoughts describing ordering relations between three distinct classes of things: (actual) states\, kinds of states\, and measures of kinds of states.

ORGANIZER;CN=Kyle H. Blumberg: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR