There is no small clause in Russian phrasal comparatives

This paper focuses on Russian comparatives, particularly those commonly referred to as phrasal and argued to contain a smaller amount of elided structure than the clausal comparatives. I investigate the restrictions on the syntactic position of the standard of comparison (SoC) in Russian phrasal comparatives and show that the existing analyses of this type of comparatives (Pancheva 2006; Philippova 2017) are not satisfactory. The proposed alternative is the direct analysis, which denies the phrasal comparative any clausal source. This claim is supported by patterns of behaviour such as the uniform case marking of the SoC and its mandatory nominal status, which the Russian phrasal comparative shares with other comparative constructions that have been argued to be genuinely phrasal (Bhatt & Takahashi 2007, 2011; Vaikšnoraitė 2021; Potsdam 2017), as well as by the interaction between scrambling and the SoC's available position, which is handled well by the direct analysis.