Detail #302: Comparing and Contrasting

Comparing things is common enough that pretty much every language has some grammaticalized way of comparing the extent to which things exhibit some property. However, not all comparison is comparison along one axis, c.f.

Moscow is expensive, but Vladivostok is far.

Clearly this attempts to compare the two in some sense, even though the qualities compared probably do not have the same weight for the comparer's purposes. Such comparison is maybe better called contrasting. However, what if a language's comparison strategy generally was very similar to the IE+*, but the morphemes didn't quite work the same way.

We can play with a few options. One would be marking all contrasted qualities:

Moscow is expensiver, but Vladivostok is further.

This does not seem particularly outlandish, even, despite the fact that we're not really comparing the extent to which the two are far away or expensive, we're rather contrasting qualities that we associate with the two towns.

Going on, we could have the suffix not even be specific to adjectives:

John likes coffee.
Erin likes tea.
John likes coffee-er but Erin likes tea-er.

Eric sings.
Johanna plays.
Eric singser but Johanna playser.

However, we find that often when we compare or contrast, one statement is more central and the other is in some sense subordinate. We could let the comparative marker go on only one of them, and I can't really decide at this stage which of these is better:

1) John likes coffee-er but Erin likes tea
2) John likes coffee but Erin likes tea-er

Maybe both are permissible, but one or the other is triggered based on pragmatic concerns; 'but Erin likes tee' is syntactically subordinate, but might be pragmatically the more central part - imagine something like 'sure, John likes coffee, but Erin, she likes tea (so we need to serve at least both tea and coffee)"

Let's go on further to even less obvious contrasts:

First, I learned to sing, then I strived to maintain that skill.

Clearly we're contrasting two periods here - that of learning, and that of maintaining, a skill. What if we had a rule that, for such not quite obvious comparisons, the marker goes on the verb that marks the more recent or more future of the verbs. (Alternatively, the more past or less future verb). We could further have the marker go in different spots morphologically: when we compare the verbs themselves, the marker goes on the stem; when the marker just defaults to going on the verb, it goes after the person and tense markers. (I would, however, like having the regular comparative verb be marked by an auxiliary that carries the comparative marker, and the tense-comparison go on the actual verb. However, this seems rather unlikely.)

* IE+ implies, in this context, Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian and NW Caucasian.