Comparatives can invoke various dimensions for comparison, but not anything goes: more coffee invokes volume or weight, but not temperature, while more coffees invokes number, but not volume or weight. In general, the extant literature assumes that the difference between more coffee/coffees reflects a morphosyntactic ambiguity of more, such that it spells out MUCH-ER with bare nouns, and MANY-ER with plural nouns. Semantically, MUCH introduces a variable over measure functions, with constraints, whereas MANY introduces a cardinality function. I argue for an alternative, univocal theory based on the decomposition MUCH-ER, and account for the observed patterns of constrained variability by means of a stronger condition on the selection of measure functions than has previously been proposed.

Wellwood, A. (2018). Structure preservation in comparatives. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 28.

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Comparative constructions like More people have been to Russia than I have are reported to be acceptable and meaningful by native speakers of English; yet, upon closer reflection, they are judged to be incoherent. This mismatch between initial perception and more considered judgment challenges the idea that we perceive sentences veridically, and interpret them fully. It is thus potentially revealing about the relationship between grammar and language processing. This paper presents the results of the first detailed investigation of these so-called 'comparative illusions'. We test four hypotheses about their source: a shallow syntactic parser, some type of repair by ellipsis, an incorrectly-resolved lexical ambiguity, or a persistent event comparison interpretation. Two formal acceptability studies show that speakers are most prone to the illusion when the matrix clause supports an event comparison reading. A verbatim recall task tests and finds evidence for such construals in speakers' recollections of the sentences. We suggest that this reflects speakers' entertaining an interpretation that is initially consistent with the sentence, but failing to notice when this interpretation becomes unavailable at the than-clause. In particular, semantic knowledge blinds people to an illicit operator-variable configuration in the syntax. Rather than illustrating processing in the absence of grammatical analysis, comparative illusions thus underscore the importance of syntactic and semantic rules in sentence processing.

Additional materials related to the published experiments and our preliminary experiments can be found on Github.

Wellwood, A., R. Pancheva, V. Hacquard, and C. Phillips. (2018). The anatomy of a comparative illusion. Journal of Semantics, 35(3).

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Beginning at least with Bach (1986), semanticists have suggested that the objects/events and substances/processes that nouns and verbs apply to are strongly parallel. We investigate whether these parallels can be understood to reflect a shared representational format in cognition, which in turn underlies aspects of the intuitive metaphysics of these categories. We hypothesized that a way of counting (atomicity) is necessary for object and event representations, unlike substance or process representations. Atomicity is strongly implied by plural language (some gorps, for novel gorp) but not mass language (some gorp). We investigate the language-perception interface across these domains using minimally different images and animations designed to encourage atomicity ('natural' spatial and temporal breaks), versus those that should not ('unnatural' breaks). Testing preference for matching such stimuli with mass or count syntax, our results support Bach’s analogy in perception, and highlight the formal role of atomicity in object and event representation.

Wellwood, A., S. J. Hespos, and L. Rips. (2018). The object : substance :: event : process analogy. In Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 2, Oxford University Press.

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The event analysis is only rarely incorporated into degree-theoretic treatments of adjectival comparatives. I propose a neodavidsonian account of predications like Ann was happy that involves quantification over both states and events. This 'double-eventuality' analysis is motivated primarily by how stage-level gradable adjectives interact with temporal for-phrases in two classes of comparatives, which I differentiate as 'low' versus 'high' attachment of the comparative morpheme. Low attachment comparatives express canonical degree readings (more available), while high attachment involve comparing numbers of occasions (available more). I resolve these patterns by positing a stative core for adjectives, and the possibility of mapping properties of states to properties of events. Low attachment interpretations, then, involve comparison of states, and high involve comparison of (pluralities of) events. I show that the analysis extends to other cases where states and events can do work for adjectives outside of comparatives.

Wellwood, A. (2016). States and events for S-level gradable adjectives. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 26.

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In acquiring a semantics, children relate their experience of their world to their experience of speakers. When we study this in the lab, we often presume to understand the first part of this relation: we take for granted how the child will experience the world of our experiment, and test for how she will experience an attendant event of speech. Such presumptions are fair. But they need to be justified, when the experience we impute to the child is much richer than what the world presents objectively. In this paper we discuss one such case, reporting on several experiments targeted at assessing event perception in pre-linguistic infants, following the lead of Gordon (2003). We begin by characterizing what a 'participant role' is, and how certain acquisition heuristics that depend on this notion are meant to facilitate verb learning.

Wellwood, A., A. X. He, J. Lidz, and A. Williams. (2015). Participant structure in event perception: towards the acquisition of implicitly 3-place predicates. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics.

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This paper explores the hypothesis that all comparative sentences—nominal, verbal, and adjectival—contain instances of a single morpheme that compositionally introduces degrees. This morpheme, sometimes pronounced much, semantically contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events, or states, to their measures along various dimensions. A major goal of the paper is to argue that the differences in dimensionality observed across domains are a consequence of what is measured, as opposed to which expression introduces the measurement. The resulting theory has a number of interesting properties. It characterizes the notion of ‘measurement’ uniformly across comparative constructions, in terms of non-trivial structure preservation. It unifies the distinctions between mass/count nouns and atelic/telic verb phrases with that between gradable and non-gradable adjectives. Finally, it affords a uniform characterization of semantically anomalous comparisons across categories.

Wellwood, A. (2015). On the semantics of comparison across categories. Linguistics & Philosophy, 38(1).

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Determining the semantic content of sentences, and uncovering regularities between linguistic form and meaning, requires attending to both morphological and syntactic properties of a language with an eye to the notional categories that the various pieces of form express. In this dissertation, I investigate the morphosyntactic devices that English speakers (and speakers of other languages) can use to talk about comparisons between things: comparative sentences with, in English,more… than, as… as, too, enough, and others. I argue that a core component of all of these constructions is a unitary element expressing the concept of measurement.

The theory that I develop departs from the standard degree-theoretic analysis of the semantics of comparatives in three crucial respects: First, gradable adjectives do not (partially or wholly) denote measure functions; second, degrees are introduced compositionally; and three, the introduction of degrees arises uniformly from the semantics of the expression much. These ideas mark a return to the classic morphosyntactic analysis of comparatives found in Bresnan (1973), while incorporating and extending semantic insights of Schwarzschild (2002, 2006). Of major interest is how the dimensions for comparison observed across the panoply of comparative constructions vary, and these are analyzed as a consequence of what is measured (individuals, events, states, etc.), rather than which expressions invoke the measurement.

This shift in perspective leads to the observation of a number of regularities in the mapping between form and meaning that could not otherwise have been seen. First, the notion of measurement expressed across comparative constructions is familiar from some explications of that concept in measurement theory (e.g. Berka 1983). Second, the distinction between gradable and non-gradable adjectives is formally on a par with that between mass and count nouns, and between atelic and telic verb phrases. Third, comparatives are perceived to be acceptable if the domain for measurement is structured, and to be anamolous otherwise. Finally, elaborations of grammatical form reflexively affect which dimensions for comparison are available to interpretation.

Wellwood, A. (2014). Measuring Predicates. University of Maryland linguistics dissertation.

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Questions about the nature of the relationship between language and extralinguistic cognition are old, but only recently has a new view emerged that allows for the systematic investigation of claims about linguistic structure, based on how it is understood or utilized outside of the language system. Our paper represents a case study for this interaction in the domain of event semantics. We adopt a transparency thesis about the relationship between linguistic structure and extralinguistic cognition, investigating whether different lexico-syntactic structures can differentially recruit the visual causal percept. A prominent analysis of causative verbs like move suggests reference to two distinct events and a causal relationship between them, whereas non-causative verbs like push do not so refer. In our study, we present English speakers with simple scenes that either do or do not support the perception of a causal link, and manipulate (between subjects) a one-sentence instruction for the evaluation of the scene. Preliminary results suggest that competent speakers of English are more likely to judge causative constructions than non-causative constructions as true of a scene where causal features are present in the scene. Implications for a new approach to the investigation of linguistic meanings and future directions are discussed.

Vogel, C., A. Wellwood, R. Dudley, and J. B. Ritchie. (2013). Talking about causing events.The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication: Vol. 9.

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Bresnan (1973) posited that more is uniformly analyzed as much-er, whether it appears with adjectives (more intelligent, redder) or nouns (more soup). On the earliest degree-semantic analysis of such constructions, much appears but is semantically inert: it serves to morphologically mark the presence of the degree argument which is introduced by adjectives and nouns (Cresswell 1976). I present an alternative analysis, one suggested by Cresswell himself: on this account, the degree argument is introduced by much. I first show how the interpretation of this morpheme as a structure-preserving mapping to the domain of degrees is motivated by data from nominal and verbal comparatives, and then how it extends to adjectival comparatives. To accomplish this, I argue that adjectives express predicates of states, and interact with degrees only in composition with much. The upshot is a theory in which much universally provides the mapping to degrees for comparison by more, regardless of the syntactic category it combines with.

Wellwood, A. (2012). Back to basics: more is always much-er. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17.

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This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insights of Hackl (2000) and Bale & Barner (2009), we show that more behaves uniformly when it combines with nominal and verbal predicates: (i) it cannot combine with singular count NPs or perfective telic VPs; (ii) grammatical properties of the predicates determine the scale of comparison—plural marked NPs and habitual VPs are compared on a scale of cardinality, whereas mass NPs and perfective (atelic) VPs are (often) compared along non-cardinal, though monotonic, scales. Taken together, our findings confirm and strengthen parallels that have independently been drawn between the nominal and verbal domains. In addition, our discussion and data, drawn from English, Spanish, and Bulgarian, suggest that the semantic contribution of more can be given a uniform analysis.

Wellwood, A., V. Hacquard, and R. Pancheva. (2012). Measuring and comparing individuals and events. Journal of Semantics, 29(2).

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