The coordination-like structure of comparatives

In the seventies, the main question concerning comparatives was whether they involve Wh-movement (Chomsky 1977; Den Besten 1978) or not (Bresnan 1975, 1976). Bresnan's evidence for the claim that comparatives do not involve Wh-movement, but rather deletion over a variable, was only slightly more convincing than Chomsky's evidence for the opposite, so the problem remained unsolved until Corver (1990) presented some more arguments supporting Bresnan's hypothesis. Once he had established that no Whmovement rule can account for the subdeletion facts that can be observed in comparatives, Corver suggested (cf. Hankamer 1973; Huang 1977; Napoli 1983) that clausal comparatives are in fact coordination structures, because they can undergo operations like Gapping and Right Node Raising which are, thus far, strictly reserved for coordination structures.