Structure preservation in comparatives

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.

official link (open access)