Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese

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Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese (118) a. The lexical head hypothesis b. The functional head hypothesis AP DegP 3 3 DegP A Deg’ 6 2 2 degree clause Deg 6 Deg AP g degree clause g geng geng In the lexical head hypothesis (118a), the degree adverb and the degree clause form a degree quantifier argument in the specifier position of the gradable predicate. However, in this analysis the degree clause has to be obligatorily raised, this movement is not motivated by anything apart from the need to derive the correct surface word order. Contrarily, the original functional head hypothesis for CC in English as in (118b), the degree clause is in the specifier position. Based on the locality restriction, the functional head hypothesis provides a better architecture with a closer syntactical relationship among the core elements of CC. In BCC there are two possible tree structures under the functional head hypothesis. See (119a). (119) The functional head hypothesis a. DegP b. DegP ei ei vP/ aP Deg’ 5 Deg’ ei bi-clause ei Deg 5 Deg vP/ aP (geng) bi-clause (geng) The configuration in (119a) goes against the morphological constituency between the degree adverb geng and the main predicate, which is a common morphological rule in both MC and English; that is, a degree adverb should take a gradable predicate as its 70 中正大學 e-Thesys (94 學年度)
Syntax of the Bi Comparative Construction in Mandarin Chinese complement. In BCC the degree head geng does not work without the degree bi-clause; in other words they should co-occur with each other. For this reason, we hypothesize that in BCC the degree head geng has a strong requirement on two arguments, the gradable predicates as the internal argument and the degree bi-clause as the specifier to license the projection of Deg which is shown as (119b). 3.4.2 A geng-headed Comparative Structure Take the sentence in (120a) as an example; based on the pragmatics rule for the daily conversation, we can get that (120a) involves two gradable clauses to be compared, which is illustrated in (120b). The proposed syntactic tree structure of BCC is shown as (121). (120) a. wo bi zuotian xiang ni I COM yesterday miss you ‘I miss you more than I did yesterday.’ b. [wo jintian (geng) xiang ni] [bi wo zuotian xiang ni]] I today more miss you COM I yesterday miss you 71 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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