More natural than what we expected:Degree relatives in standards of comparison

Abstract

This article investigates for the first time a subgroup of Basque comparatives that show variation in their standard of comparison, both from a theoretical and experimental perspective. Based on data from descriptive and prescriptive grammars, and on the results collected through a controlled experiment carried out among Basque speakers, an exhaustive examination of comparatives with an inflected verb and the complementizer -(e)n in the standard or complementizer plus determiner (-(e)na) is offered (“Irabazten duen/duena baino gehiago behar du” ‘(S)he needs more than (s)he earns’). Thus, we contribute to describing and examining a relevant locus of intralinguistic variation in depth. It is explained as a result of a process of linguistic change, probably triggered by the contact situation between Basque and Spanish in some Basque territories. The results of the experimental study support previous observations mentioned in the literature on the variable acceptability of comparatives with -(e)n or -(e)na and in situ or dislocated standards of comparison, and offer us an empirical basis to build a new analysis. We defend that nowadays Basque -(e) n or -(e)na comparatives reflect a behavior similar to that of comparatives with semi-free relatives in Spanish and we offer a novel syntactic analysis of these less-studied constructions.