Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese

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Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese categorizations, too. In Southern Min, BCC is the most common types of all CCs (Li 1994). In (115) the degree adverb ka marks the superlative degree of the main predicate, while the degree clauses bi yi provides the context of the comparison. Though the bi-clause can mark the meaning of comparison, ellipsis of the degree adverb makes the sentence unacceptable. (115) a. wa bi yi *(ka) guan (Southern Min) I COM him more tall ‘I am taller than you. Adjective in Japanese are said to have similar syntactic behavior in the predicate position, in which the adjectival predicates need to co-occur with some adverb or particle. In Japanese comparatives like (116), there is also s-selectional restriction between yori and motto/mo. (116) a. watashi-ha totemo segaitakai I-TOP very tall ‘I am very tall.’ b. watshi-ha [Taro yori] (motto/mo) segatakai-desu I-TOP Taro than more tall-PART ‘I am taller than Taro.’ (117) a. watashi-ha anatta-wo totemo aishitei-ru I-AGENT you-ACC very love-PRESENT ‘I love you.’ 68 中正大學 e-Thesys (94 學年度)
Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese b. watashiha [Taro yori](motto/mo) anata-wo aishiteiru I-AGENT Taro than more you- ACC love-PRESENT ‘I love you more than Taro does. The cross-linguistic evidence make our argument more promising that the degree adverb on the gradable predicate is the head of BCC. Base on this we will then propose a geng-headed comparative structure in the following section. 3.4 The Syntactic Structure of BCC In the literature, there are three main types of analysis on the structure of BCC, the Adjunction Analysis (Fu 1978, Liu 1998) and the Conjunction Analysis (Tsao1989, Hong 1911), and a Complementation Analysis headed by the adjectives, which is similar to ditransitive verbs (Chao 2005). A new complementation analysis headed by the degree adverb geng will be proposed in this study. From the previous Sections 3.1 and 3.2, we can get the widely accepted conclusion that BCC in MC are like that in English, which involves comparison of two propositions (Bresnan 1975, Fu 1978, Hong 1991, Liu 1998, Chao 2005 and so forth). In discussing the syntactic structure of BCC, we are going to incise from the syntactic relation among the degree geng, the degree clause, and the matrix gradable predicate. 3.4.1 A Functional Head Hypothesis To make clear the relationship between the degree adverb, the degree clause, and matrix gradable predicate, Bhatt and Roumyana (2004) collect two main approaches, the lexical head hypothesis and the functional head hypothesis (118). 69 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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