Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese

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Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese (100) a. wo shuo zhe ge didian bucuo. (Her 2006) I say this CL location not-bad ‘I say this location is not bad.’ b. wo tongyi shuo zhe ge didian bucuo. I agree COMP this CL location not-bad ‘I agree that this location is not bad.’ (101) a. (??shuo) zhe ge didian bucuo, wo tongyi. (Her 2006) COMP this CL location not-bad I agree ‘That this location is not bad, I agree.’ b. *gei wo chi shengyupian, ta qu mao yu. for I eat sasimi he go buy fish ‘For me to have sasimi to eat, he went to buy fish.’ Just like the MC complementizer gei and shuo, which have some historical relations with verbs and prepositions, the word bi that shares some syntactic features with verbs and prepositions (see Section 3.1.1 and 3.1.2) can behave as complementizers, too. Sentence (102a) is a typical BCC, however, it is the two clauses with gradable predicates ai ni that can be compared. Giving further analysis in (102b), we can tell that the embedded clause has undergone vP-ellipsis leaving the contrasting part Lisi in its PF. The bi in BCC is a complementizer that introduces a clause to be the comparative datum. (102) a. wo bi Lisi geng ai ni I COM Lisi more love you ‘I love you more than Lisi does.’ 60 中正大學 e-Thesys (94 學年度)
Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese b. wo [CPbi Lisi ai ni] geng ai ni I COM Lisi love you more love you Note that, according to Her (2006), MC complementizers such as gei and shuo needs to be licensed and thus cannot stand alone, the comparative marker bi is not an exception. The comparative bi-clause occurs only with gradable phrases that are modified by the degree adverb geng. The complementizer determines the type of IP which it introduces. English that selects finite clauses and English for selects infinitival clauses (Hageman 1997:53), similarly bi in MC selects gradable comparative clauses. In the following section 3.3, we are going to find out more evidence to support the hypothesis that bi and geng has co-occurrence restriction and maintain the necessity of geng in BCC. 3.3 The Syntactic Status of the Degree adverb- geng 13 Gradable predicates can include nominal, adjectival, and verbal predicates (Sapir 1944, Bolinger 1972) in (103), it is the gradable feature that makes the clauses comparable. In this section, we are going to propose that though the comparative degree adverb geng is often covert in the PF, it is actually the head of the comparative DegP that assign feature to the comparative bi-clauses. 13 Besides geng, the comparative degree adverbs can also have its alternations haiyao/ hai, ‘more,’ for some phonological or pragmatic reason; they cannot alternate for each other in some cases, and sometimes even both of them can be covert. Phonologically, the stress on geng is heavier than haiyao/ hai, so we hopothesize that the degree of emphatic meaning on these alternative comparavie degree adverbs are geng >haiyao/ hai>φ. Yet, geng seems to occur in most cases, we take geng as the representitive of the comparative degree adverb. (i) a. wo bi Lisi (geng/haiyao) gao I COM Lisi more tall ‘I am taller than Lisi.’ b. wo bi Lisi (*geng)/(haiyao) gao san gongfen I COM Lisi more tall three centimeter ‘I am three centimeters taller than Lisi is.’ 61 中正大學 e-Thesys (94 學年度)
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Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese

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