A Contrastive Analysis between English and Korean Comparative Constructions

Comparative constructions display the most intriguing properties in natural languages, in that they interact with a variety of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic phenomena. In this paper, we look into the comparative constructions of two typologically different languages, Korean and English. The two languages are similar in that each employs its own morphological and syntactic ways of expressing gradable concepts and making comparison between various properties of two objects. However, the two languages are also different in many respects: the paper describes unlike English, Korean clausal comparatives are relative clauses headed by the formal noun kes. In addition, the paper shows that unlike the compositional nature of English comparatives, the interpretation of Korean comparatives is highly context-dependent.