Packaging comparative thoughts

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—morphemes—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.