The Research Group in Syntax & Morphology (Research Programme in Language Sciences; School of Communication & Culture; Aarhus University) is pleased to announce the following guest lecture by Norbert Corver, Utrecht University:

De(gree)familiarization: comparatives and superlatives through an adpositional lens    (Tuesday, November 11, at 13:15)

In Chomsky’s (1993:4) article A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory, it is stated that “The notion of grammatical construction is eliminated, and with it, construction-particular rules.” He further argues that “Constructions such as verb phrases, relative clause, and passive remain only as taxonomic artifacts, collections of phenomena explained through the interaction of the principles of UG, with the values of parameters fixed.” Adopting this perspective on so-called “grammatical constructions”, I will examine the nature and behavior of degree-related phenomena in Dutch adjectival “constructions”, with a special focus on comparative and superlative constructions. In my talk, I will take seriously the following guidelines characteristic of generative grammar: (i) the non-existence of construction-particular rules, (ii) the existence of cross-categorial parallelism, and (iii) the importance of structural decomposition. Questions that will be addressed include: Is -er in, for example, taller really a comparative morpheme? And what is the grammatical nature of the Dutch standard marker dan and its English counterpart than in comparative constructions? I hope to shed some light on the nature of these degree-related phenomena by “making them strange”. As a grammatical device for defamiliarizing these familiar grammatical elements, I will look at them and analyze them “through an adpositional lens”.

Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory. In Kenneth Locke Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds.), The View from Building 20 - Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 1–52. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Reprinted in Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.