: The sentence Irving was closer to me than he was to most of the others contains a quantifier, most of the others, in the scope of a comparative. The first part of this paper explains the challenges presented by such cases to existing approaches to the semantics of the comparative. The second part presents a new analysis of comparatives based on intervals rather than points on a scale. This innovation is analogized to the move from moments to intervals in tense semantics. The remainder of the paper is concerned with an interval based semantics of degree in relation to issues other than the comparative proper. The paper begins with a discussion of the role negative polarity has played in studies on the semantics of comparatives. 0.

this paper is that: (1) scalar predicates have a semantics based on intervals, not points. The chief evidence for the claim in (1) will come from comparatives that contain quantifiers. The challenge these constructions present for degree analyses is easy to see. It may very well be that Frank is taller than everyone else is without there being a point on the scale corresponding to everyone else. Similarly, if the shirts range in price from $20 to $100 and the dress is $150 then the dress is more expensive than the shirts are, yet there is no point that corresponds to the shirts. Clearly, in these cases there is an interval of the height scale corresponding to everyone but Frank and which lies below Frank's height and there is an interval of the price scale corresponding to the shirts which lies below the price of the dress. A shift similar to the one proposed here for the semantics of scalar predicates occurred in our understanding of temporal expressions. Expressions like before and after

This paper is an extended comment on Schoorlemmer’s (1995) theory of tense in Russian, more accurately on her attempt to link aspectual structure with temporal structure. Schoorlemmer (henceforth S.) claims that tense in Russian behaves very differently from English or Dutch tense. In particular,

this paper, except where noted, comes from a large corpus of examples constructed by Amarillas, a speaker of Arizona Hiaki, in consultation with Rosario Amarillas Buitimea, a Sonoran Hiaki speaker, as part of the Hiaki Reduplication Project and the On-Line Dictionaries for Native American Languages project at the University of Arizona. It contains examples of 354 Hiaki verbs beginning with letters from A-M; the project had not progressed farther in the alphabet at * Thanks very much to Rosario Amarillas Buitimea for his help as a consultant. Thanks to Eloise Jelinek and the editors of this volume for their valuable comments and suggestions. This work was partially funded by the Arizona On-line Dictionaries for Native American Languages project and by a grant from the Jacobs Research Fund at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham Washington. Any shortcomings of this work are of course fully our responsibility

This paper addresses some problems about the semantics of two groups of transitive verbs that are intensional in certain ways. One group is that of creation verbs, such as ‘assemble’, ‘bake’, ‘build’, and ‘manufacture’. The other is that of depiction verbs, such as ‘draw’, ‘sketch’, ‘caricature’, ‘sculpt’, ‘write (about)’, ‘imagine’, and