This in depth areal typological study analyzes the grammatical means which are employed in the languages of Europe to express the comparative of inequality superiority The extant theories and hypotheses about the morphosyntactic structure and the cross linguistic distribution of construction types are reviewed The behavior of comparatives under the conditions of language contact is discussed Data from more than 170 standard and nonstandard varieties of European languages are scrutinized systematically The synchronic picture is complemented by a chapter on the diachrony of comparative constructions The European facts are compared to those of the geographically adjacent Asian and African regions It is argued that cross linguistic investigations must take account also of so called secondary options These secondary options suggest strongly that the supposedly dominant role of the particle comparative cannot be upheld for Europe Moreover only the secondary options allow us to draw isoglosses which cross the borders between Europe and Asia and Africa

Competing Comparative Constructions in Europe PDF

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