Out-Applicatives Are Concealed Comparatives

The prefix out- attaches to nouns, adjectives, and verbs to form transitive verbs. We argue that the resulting verbs describe an event with the subject argument as a participant and have a uniformly comparative meaning, namely that the degree of the event along some contextually fixed dimension of comparison exceeds a standard identified by the object argument. The object can identify the standard (a) directly by describing it, (b) by establishing an event of the same type as the verbal event but with the object as a participant, or (c) by establishing a modal domain of worlds in which there is an event of the same type as the verbal event with the subject argument as a participant.

a. Degree comparison: NLMK Group outachieved the BAT level of water consumption as early as 2010.

b. Event comparison: The Dutch ladies were out-gutturaling even the Swiss themselves.

c. Modal comparison: John outlived the actuarial tables.

We show that these varieties of comparison have equivalent counterparts in overt more/-er than comparatives and in too/enough comparatives.

Our proposal is the first unified analysis of out-comparatives. Previous formal analyses have singled out event comparisons like (b) (Tolskaya 2014, Ahn 2022). Cases like (a) and (c) have been studied less. Ahn suggests that they are “a separate (though perhaps related) phenomenon . . . with a different (perhaps resultative) meaning”. On the other hand, Kotowski (2021) proposes that all out-verbs introduce a causative or “competition” macro-event and lie on an “interpretational cline” between comparative and resultative meanings. We argue that the resultative and competition interpretations are inferential.

Our analysis depends on a morphological derivation of out-verbs by prefixing out- to a base that preserves its argument structure and Theta-roles, if it has any. We present evidence that supports a morphological derivation over Ahn’s syntactic derivation which gets the argument structure of out-verbs entirely from the prefix out- independently of the base’s argument structure. Our analysis explains in particular why the base of out- cannot be an obligatorily transitive verb.