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Subordinate comparative clauses mostly do not contain a verb and are then considered to be elliptic CPs. Nevertheless there are languages in which the comparative clause cannot always be analysed as an elliptic clause. This paper focuses on two cases in which an elliptic analysis is impossible. In the first case, occurring in Italian and Romanian, the comparative clause contains a pronoun in the accusative case instead of the expected nominative caseand the pronoun appears to receive its case from the complementizer, which thus acts as a preposition. In the second case, the comparative complement is marked by a preposition (cf.Italian or, with cardinals, in all Romance languages) or by a case (e.g. ablative in Latin,genitive in Russian and in Modern Greek). In the two cases the comparative complement cannot be analysed as a clausal constituent. The non clausal structure exhibits a kind ofshort cut : although a comparison always concerns two degrees of one or two different predicates, it is made directly between two alternative arguments of the predicate. This shortcut appears mostly when the compared arguments are the subject of the predicate.