Standards of comparison and the case of Spanish 'que-de alternation'

This paper offers a formal syntactic and semantic analysis of standards of comparison in Spanish, in addition to presenting a parametric analysis that accounts for the variation in standards of comparison cross-linguistically. Two independent parameters are argued to account for the properties of standards of comparison in languages typologically as diverse as Spanish, English, Japanese or Turkish: (i) a syntactic parameter, by which either phrasal, or both phrasal and clausal structures are allowed in the complement position of the standard marker; and (ii) a revised semantic parameter that restricts the semantic type of the standard.