1. In the last few years there have been three papers published devoted wholly or largely to a study of the English comparative construction: Lees (1961); Smith (1961); and Pilch (1965) The focus of attention has been the structure of what, following Pilch, I shall call the comparative expansion (the constituent introduced by than or as), rather than the morphology of the compared adjective or adverb. It is not surprising that so much interest should be shown in this construction at a time when one of the main concerns of linguists is to make their syntactic descriptions maximally explicit. For as this was not the aim of traditional grammarians, they had relatively little to say on the structure of the comparative expansion, implicitly assuming doubtless that such ungrammaticalities as

(1) *John bought a bigger car than Mary went home yesterday can be ruled out by commonsense, semantics, or logic.