UCLA

Relative clauses can range over degrees, just as they can range over individuals. But this class of degree relatives is rarely studied uniformly across the diverse constructions they help form. As a result, there have been a number of construction-specific proposals to model the semantics of degree relatives: in equatives, amount relatives, and wh -exclamatives. The goals of this article are to review a standard semantics of relativization writ large, to supplement it with standard assumptions from degree semantics, and to explain how the previously strange behavior of a variety of constructions formed from degree relatives comes out as a natural consequence of a handful of straightforward assumptions. Specifically, I argue that degree relatives are just relative clauses that range over degrees, and that these degree readings of relative clauses are available wherever we have ( a ) the appropriate morphology (e.g., a relativizer that can range over degrees), ( b ) a context of utterance that makes salient some informative (monotonic) dimension of measurement, and ( c ) an individual referent that is associated with a single, determinate measure along that dimension in the context of utterance.