Variation and Deviation in Portuguese Comparative Structures

Abstract

In this paper, a group of relatively anomalous comparative constructions found in corpora of newspaper texts is studied from a syntactic and semantic perspective. These illustrate the fact that comparatives exhibit a high degree of variation in the standard variety of European Portuguese. Assuming the hypothesis that comparatives are a special type of relative clauses, and taking into account the grammatical properties of (the relevant) quantifiers, clitics and anaphoric expressions, an explanation is proposed as to why some marginal structures are more frequent – and better accepted – than others. Two major classes of comparative constructions are considered: those that include explicit anaphoric elements (in three kinds of environments), and those – arguably non-sentential in nature – that directly refer to degrees.