A Study of Temporal Comparison in English and Malay

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This project is situated within the field of formal linguistics, more specifically within its subfield of formal semantics. The aim of this research is to explore the phenomenon of temporal comparison in English and Malay, thus contributing a contrastive study of this topic in these two languages. The wider goal of semantic research, and consequently this project, is to investigate whether any elements of meaning are truly universal and to critically examine and characterise the variation that we find.There are three principal research questions for this project: Q1 How is temporal comparison expressed in Malay? Q2 What is the underlying grammar of temporal comparison and to what extent is it modelled on the grammar of degree? Q3 How does this empirical and theoretical picture compare to English?