Some universals of comparative constructions: Revisiting Greenberg, Stassen and Heine
Creators: name: Haspelmath, Martin
name: Mizuno, Shogo
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: Some universals of comparative constructions: Revisiting Greenberg, Stassen and Heine

Here we present results from a new database of comparative constructions, containing over 500 constructions from about 400 languages (over 100 different top-level families), in which we reexamine some of the universal generalizations that were reported in the seminal work by Greenberg (1963) and Stassen (1985), as well as global areal generalizations in the wake of Heine (1994). Recent work has in some detail examined comparatives in several geographical regions (such as  Melanesia, Schapper & de Vries 2018; or East Asia, Zhou 2024), and there are six relevant Grambank features (Skirgård et al. 2023), but a comprehensive worldwide study has not been undertaken in the last two decades, and universals have not been a focus of research.

     We first reexamine Greenberg’s (1963) claim (Universal 22) that the order of standard and adjective correlates with the order of adposition and nominal, and we find it overwhelmingly confirmed (see also Dryer 1992: 92 on the correlation with VO/OV). We discuss an explanation in terms of pressure for early immediate constituents (Hawkins 2004) or dependency length minimization, and we suggest that the position of the standard marker (than in English) is crucial. Even when it is not adposition-derived (as in Comparative Cycle cases; Jäger 2021), it generally behaves similarly. 

     We next treat comparative degree markers (e.g. -er in English warm-er), whose relation to superlatives was famously explored by Bobaljik (2012) (but superlatives are not in the scope of our study). For degree markers, we question the distinction between “bound” and “non-bound” markers that led the Grambank authors to set up two different features (GB275 and GB276). Instead, we focus on the position of the degree markers and compare them with the position of degree adverbs of the ‘very’ type (Dryer 2005). There are no striking correlations here, but we discuss two universals that have not received much attention, perhaps because they have been taken for granted.

(1) In almost all languages, when there is a length asymmetry between the positive and the comparative form of the adjective, the comparative form is longer.

 

(2) When there is an asymmetry, comparatives of superiority are always shorter than comparatives of inferiority.

From a semantic point of view, comparatives are often thought to be more basic (cf. Grano & Davis 2018), so that (1) may seem unexpected. And since Apple is more expensive than Samsung is semantically symmetric with Samsung is less expensive than Apple, there does not seem to be semantic explanation for (2) either (cf. Modina 2021), and we propose an explanation in terms of communicative efficiency (Levshina 2023).

     In contrast to Grambank, we distinguish between ablative, allative and locative standard markers, which allows us to reexamine Stassen’s (1985) claims about their correlation with word order and clause-combining systems. Again, we do not find strong associations, though there are of course general correlations between word order patterns and clause-linkage types (e.g. Diessel 2019).

     But we do find evidence for another universal that has not been widely discussed:

 

(3) Single-predicate comparative constructions never lack a standard marker.

 

We have no explanation for this universal; since specific degree markers are quite common, one might think that standard markers are dispensable, but they are not.

     Finally, our study confirms Heine’s (1994) observation that comparative construction types show striking areality, both across and within continents. In particular, the use of degree markers on adjective and the use of bipredicational comparative constructions is distributed very differently, and we briefly discuss what might be the reasons for this.

 

References 

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