Abstract

The paper focuses on the analysis of equality comparative constructions in English with reference to the study of comparison in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston et al. 2002), where a distinction is made between scalar and non-scalar comparison.

The author proposes a unitary analysis of scalar and non-scalar equality comparisons and interprets the relationships between equality and similarity using two explanatory mechanisms: a similarity-identity continuum and a quantification scale. The former accounts for gradience in likeness between terms of comparison, whereas the latter explains the difference between scalar equality and non-scalar similarity constructions.

The paper also aims to clarify the nature of the mutual relations between as- and like-constructions that function as predicative and manner complements, as well as to explain the competition of as and like in manner complements.