Comparative Romance Syntax. Frozen Adverbs in Italian and in Portuguese

The Lexicon-Grammar of frozen adverbs of comparison has been established for French (M. Gross 1984b), Portuguese (Marques Ranchhod 1990, 1991) and Italian (De Gioia 1994a) in a monolingual perspective. The systematic character of such descriptions allowed us to make an explicit comparison between Italian and Portuguese. The observations we made outlined, on the one hand, that the syntactic properties of these forms are analogous to those of free comparatives, and, on the other hand, that they are largely similar among the Romance languages involved.