No Less Than Four Notes on Less (Linguistics‪)‬

ABSTRACT Here are four notes concerned with related aspects of the morphosyntax of less in English. The first is concemed with (re-)drawing attention to the currency of a usage in which less is accompanied by a plural noun, as in the title of the article. The second aims to show that less and its ancestors are heads of a partitive construction, whether this is marked overtly or not. In the third note we are concerned with the explicit characterisation of the status of vatious determiners, including less, with respect to countability and collcctivity. Finally, note four examines the status of less as a comparative, and attempts to resolve thereby two anomalies observed in note 1. I do not address here, for the most part, the "adverbial" uses of less and its ancestors. (1)