Discussion Details
| Title: | On Comparative Inversions |
| Submitter: | Dong-woo Park |
| Description: | Culicover and Winkler (2008) in Journal of Linguistics says that more than
one auxiliary can precede a subject in comparative inversion structures as follows. A. ANNA ran much faster than could have MANNY. B. ANNA ran much faster than MANNY could have. It is also suggested that in order for the sentence A to be grammatical, there are two premises. The first one is MANNY should be a contrastive focus. And the second one is MANNY must receive a strong falling pitch accent. However, a lot of native speakers whose mother tongue is English say that sentence A is ungrammatical. I know that this sentence is rather marginal. So I am not sure whether I can examine this kind of comparative inversion in my paper as a main topic. I would appreciate any input others may have on this matter. |
| Date Posted: | 07-Jul-2010 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Syntax |
| LL Issue: | 21.2821 |
| Posted: | 07-Jul-2010 |
