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Is degree abstraction a parameter or a universal? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

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Abstract

Mandarin Chinese, along with Japanese, Yorùbá, Mòoré, and Samoan, has been argued to lack ‘degree abstraction’, a configuration at LF involving lambda abstraction over a degree variable. These languages are claimed to have a negative setting for a hypothesized ‘Degree Abstraction Parameter’. Recent work, however, has argued for degree abstraction in Japanese and Yorùbá, and degree abstraction has been detected in a number of additional languages. Could it in fact be universal? Here, we focus on the case of Mandarin, and argue that Mandarin has degree abstraction too. We offer three arguments in favor of degree abstraction in Mandarin, based on attributive comparatives, comparatives with embedded predicates, and scope interactions with modals. We also rebut prior arguments for the lack of degree abstraction in Mandarin, considering degree questions, measure phrases, and negative island effects. Taken together, these results show that degree abstraction is not a parameter along which Mandarin and English vary, and suggest rather that degree abstraction may be universally available.

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Data Availability

All data is reported in the paper.

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Notes

  1. Purported examples of [−DSP] languages include Motu (Beck et al. 2009), Washo (Bochnak 2015), and Nez Perce (Deal and Hohaus 2019), among others; in these languages, it is argued that gradable predicates are ordinary predicates of individuals.

  2. We assume that max is defined as the unique greatest degree among a set of degrees, so max(D) is equivalent to \({\iota d \,.\,D(d) \land \forall d' [ D(d) \rightarrow d'\leq d]}\).

  3. Whether bi contributes to the comparative semantics or not, this predicate-marking analysis is applicable (see the treatment of English than and -er in Alrenga et al. 2012).

  4. For readers who are interested in the acceptability of these attributive bi-comparatives, more examples can be found in major Chinese corpus lists such as the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) and the UCLA Written Chinese Corpus. The following example is adopted from the LCMC:

    1. (i)
      figure u

    As illustrated by the boldfaced adjectives in the example, gradable adjectives, whether degree or quantity, can occur in such attributive constructions.

  5. Bijiao cannot replace geng in (20) because bijiao cannot co-occur with bi-phrases, being subject to the Constraint on Multiple Foci (Liu 2018).

  6. Here we focus on those comparatives with an overt bi-phrase. While bi-comparatives have been studied to a considerable extent in the literature, attributive ones have received scarce attention as far as we are aware. For insights into non-bi-comparatives with geng and bijiao, see Liu (2018) for more a detailed discussion.

  7. We adopt two of Kennedy’s (2009) tests for explicit and implicit comparisons. The third test Kennedy proposes involves differential measure phrases combing directly with the comparative operator. We exclude this test only because it is inapplicable to attributive comparatives.

  8. We assume that the direct object ‘d-long de paper’ combines with the verb via Restrict plus Existential Closure à la Chung and Ladusaw (2004).

  9. Beck et al. (2012) and Berezovskaya and Hohaus (2015) point out that a Kennedy (1997)-style three-place comparative operator that combines first with a gradable predicate and then with the standard DP cannot produce a sensible reading for attributive comparatives in English. The comparative operator would have to undergo movement from its base position in order to produce the right kind of derived gradable predicate, and the standard DP would then have to undergo movement in order to be accessible to the comparative operator. The problem is that there is no movement operation that would place the standard DP in the right position to be fed as the second argument to the comparative operator.

    However, there is a crucial difference between the derivation that Beck et al. (2012) point out to be impossible and the one we propose here. Due to the base positions of the target and standard DPs in the structure for Mandarin comparatives that we assume following Xiang (2005), where both are in subject positions at different levels of the same clause, it suffices for the standard DP to undergo a short QR movement, opening up a position for the comparative operator to be inserted parasitically. As shown in our derivation, the arguments are then positioned correctly to combine with the Kennedy (1997)-style operator in Mandarin. Hence, (31) is a viable analysis of attributive bi-comparatives.

  10. Under a 3-place bi analysis, geng can be viewed as a relative pronoun like which; on this view, it moves to take scope over an expression of type 〈e,t〉 and triggers predicate abstraction, forming the complex gradable predicate of type 〈d,et〉 (e.g., λd . λx . x wrote a d-long paper). On the other hand, under the 2-place bi analysis, a coherent proposal is that geng functions as a type-shifting operator such that it changes the degree-last gradable predicate of type 〈e,〈d,t〉〉 to 〈d,〈e,t〉〉 to allow abstraction over the degree variable in attributive comparatives.

  11. Our treatment of geng aligns with Liu (2010a) in viewing it as a comparative operator. Liu (2010a) suggests that geng has an evaluative presupposition that both the standard and the target are true of the property denoted by the gradable predicate. Example (i), for instance, implies that both John and Bill are tall, in contrast to the form without geng.

    1. (i)
      figure ai

    But there are non-presuppositional uses of geng: in the following scenario, (iib) is a natural continuation of (iia).

    1. (ii)
      figure aj

    If the use of geng in (iia) presupposes that the standard (i.e., vote) is important, the speaker would not use (iib) to clarify that he isn’t saying that votes are not important. Quite to the contrary, (iia) seems to imply something in conflict with the purported presupposition. So we are hesitant to adopt the assumption that geng lexically carries such a presupposition. We leave it open how to account for the observation that (i) implies that both John and Bill are tall.

  12. There are some other degree morphemes such as yidian and yixie ‘a bit’ that may function as a signal that a comparative construction is in play. These occur in Mandarin transitive comparatives like John gao Bill yidian ‘John is a bit taller than Bill’ (Grano and Kennedy 2012). These morphemes can also be used with attributive adjectives and give rise to comparative readings in some cases:

    1. (i)
      figure ak

    There are many open questions about how to understand the role of these items in comparatives. Yidian and yixie appear after the adjective, and they can co-occur with the other pre-adjectival items like bijiao and geng. It is not clear whether they function as degree modifiers or vague measure phrases (Grano and Kennedy 2012) or something else. They also vary puzzlingly in their acceptability across different types of adjectives; replacing ‘long’ with ‘interesting’ in (i) degrades the sentence. Nevertheless, this data point is broadly consistent with our claim that an overt marker of comparison is required in attributive comparatives.

  13. Liu refers to them as geng-clausal comparatives but we choose ‘biclausal geng comparatives’ in order to clarify that we intend it only to apply to multi-clausal constructions, and not mono-clausal constructions that might involve a ‘clausal’ analysis of geng.

  14. Liu (2010a) uses two putative island violations as evidence that the binding relation in biclausal geng comparatives does not involve movement. For the scope of this paper, we do not extend our discussion to this issue, but we wonder whether those putative island violations necessarily lead to a conclusion as such.

  15. All examples here except (47c) are adapted from the corpora. Similar comparative meanings can be expressed in analogous no-bi constructions with bijiao, where the standards are understood contextually.

    1. (i)
      figure av

    Since bijiao involves explicit comparison (Liu 2018), these data points provide additional evidence for the possibility of embedding gradable predicates in Mandarin. The argumentation made throughout this section also holds with these bijiao-comparatives.

  16. It is controversial whether Mandarin ‘make’ verbs select small clauses as complements (Yang 2003) or full clauses (Paul 2021). Paul (2021) argues that these constructions should be analyzed as object control constructions, as illustrated in (i), where the ‘make’ verbs, unlike ECM verbs, select a DP and a clausal complement. The argument is based on the fact that the complement introduced by ‘make’ allows adverbs, negation, and aspect.

    1. (i)
      figure ay

    One reviewer points out that bang may not belong to the same group as those ‘make’-verbs and wonders if they should be discussed together. As we show below, ‘help’-phrases differ from ‘make’-phrases such that the former does not allow VP-parsing at all. This fact, however, only strengthens our argument that Mandarin has genuine embedded comparative constructions.

  17. This question was raised to us by a (non-anonymous) reviewer, Mitcho Erlewine.

  18. While we assume a maximality-based semantics for the 2-place bi in Sect. 2, we use the subset-based semantics of -er in (58) in this section in order to deal with negative antonyms. The subset-based semantics for the two-place comparative operator would yield the same results as the maximality-based semantics for the purposes of the discussion in Sect. 2.

  19. Granted, this claim is somewhat controversial. Heim (2006) states that these two readings are equivalent (p. 51). A perceived equivalence between these readings could come about through generic quantification, as one reviewer points out. The wide-scope-modal can be paraphrased as ‘In general, to avoid speeding, Tom is required to drive slower than Sue’.

  20. Our arguments for scope interactions are based on examples of attributive comparatives. We find ambiguity in adverbial comparatives analogous to the English example in (56), as shown below:

    1. (i)
      figure bm

    The sentence has a comparison-of-maxima reading ‘For motorbikes, the maximum allowed speed on I-90 is below the maximum allowed speed on I-95’. The sentence can be judged true in a scenario where the speed limit on I-90 is 60 mph and the speed limit on I-95 is 80 mph, yet one is driving 50 mph on I-90 but 40 mph on I-95. However, it is controversial whether Mandarin post-verbal adverbials are complements of the verb or simply adjuncts (Ernst 2014). Thus, it is not impossible that the ambiguity we found in (i) is in fact an ambiguity related to the structure of post-verbal adverbials in Mandarin, rather than the scope of degree quantifiers.

  21. To avoid redundancy, as well as to provide a fair assessment of the data point regarding scope interactions, we ignore instances of degree abstraction that are associated with attributive modifications in examples in this section.

  22. The surface order of the modal verb neng ‘can’ relative to bi is not rigid; neng can occur either before bi or to the immediate left of the matrix verb zhuang ‘pack’. See Sect. 3.3.3 for empirical evidence.

  23. A reviewer points out that the felicity of examples like (64) and (68) is quite surprising from the perspective that Mandarin is a scope-rigid language, assuming that it is the modal verb that takes widest scope. Two points are in order regarding this: (i) that a finding is surprising should not prevent us from concluding that it is correct—the data suggests that a comparison-of-maxima reading is available for these sorts of cases—and (ii) there is room for discussion regarding what actually constitutes surface scope in this example. Although the modal verb may precede bi linearly, as we illustrate in (67), it may be that the surface structure is as suggested by Erlewine (2018), where the comparative takes widest scope.

  24. We leave you and shi both unglossed because how they should be glossed is unclear.

  25. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this set of data to us.

  26. Another piece of evidence that shi-constructions are distinct from you-constructions is that shi can occur in positive forms without a measure phrase (also see Liu 2010b, fn. 14):

    1. (i)
      figure cd

    More evidence for the distinct feature of you-sentences and shi-sentences can be found in Xie (2014).

  27. This same is true under Kennedy and McNally’s (2005) view that measure phrases denote functions from gradable adjectives to predicates of individuals.

  28. For what it’s worth, while Beck (2012) suggests that exactly-differentials are probably the only true test for scope interactions, the second author, a native speaker of English, does not get a reading where lengths greater than 12 pages are allowed. We believe it would be worth carrying out a judgment study on native English speakers before continuing to use this type of example in semantic fieldwork on degree abstraction.

  29. Beck et al. (2009) used examples like the following (although did not report the translation into Mandarin for the “exactly” case): the minimal requirement for the length of the paper is 25 pages. The draft is 20 pages long. Your paper must be exactly 5 pages longer than that. The example we provide in (96) makes use of differential adjectival comparatives—unlike the controversial differential verbal comparatives as discussed in Sect. 3.3, differential adjectival comparatives are argued to involve degree-denoting measure phrases both by Li (2009) and Luo and Xie (2018).

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  1. Boston University, Boston, USA

    Ying Gong & Elizabeth Coppock

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  1. Ying Gong
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Appendices

Appendix A: Survey: acceptability of attributive comparatives

A reviewer observes that the marker de seems to be optional with duo ‘many’ but obligatory with chang ‘long’ in attributive bi-comparatives. This might suggest that the examples with quantity predicates that we have characterized as attributive comparatives might not be truly attributive. To establish firmly that Mandarin has both quantity and quality attributive comparatives, we carried out an acceptability judgement study to determine whether there is any difference in the syntax with respect to the particle de. Another empirical question that this study addresses has to do with the lexical semantics of the governing verb. In informal discussions regarding attributive comparatives, the intuition has been expressed that there may be pragmatic considerations governing their acceptability. This study probes the productivity of attributive comparatives.

Design.

We include sentences with four different verbs, each presented in three different attributive comparative structures (two quantity, one quality). The quality comparative always had de linking the gradable predicate and the noun, and the quantity comparatives were shown in two versions: one with de and the other without. Thus all told, there were 4 × 3 = 12 different sentences. Each participant was shown all 12 sentences.

Materials.

Mandarin sentences containing adnominal quality and quantity comparatives were constructed along with short contexts. We tested both quality and quantity attributive structures. We designed four choices of main verb and object noun (‘lexicalization’). Each lexicalization is associated with one quality attributive structure and two quantity attributive structures, which differ in the presence of de. The gradable predicate is highlighted in bold. The letters “A” and “B” in the examples stand for a proper name used in the actual experiment.

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The (a) sentences involve a quantity comparative, differing only in the presence of de between the gradable predicate and the noun. The (b) sentence involves a quality comparative.

Two attention check sentences were constructed, each associated with an expected range of responses:

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Procedure.

Participants were presented with each of the 12 sentences in a given context, along with the two attention check sentences interspersed with the items. The participants were asked to judge whether or not the sentence was a ‘correct expression’ in Mandarin on a 1-5 scale for each (5 = correct/natural, 1 = incorrect/unacceptable). The sentences were presented in a fixed order. Survey respondents participated in this experiment prior to the experiment on scope interactions reported in Sect. 3.3.3.

Participants.

Same as in the experiment on scope interactions reported in Sect. 3.3.3.

Results.

The results are shown in Fig. 2, which plots the acceptability ratings we obtained for each of the 4 × 3 sentence-types. Visually, this graph shows the same pattern with all of the verbs, and statistics (reported below) confirm this. So the hypothesis that these verbs would differ was not supported. With each verb, we found high acceptability ratings for quality predicates (with mean ratings between 4 and 5) and comparable acceptability ratings for quantity predicates with de. Regardless of verb, removing de from prenominal quantity comparatives yields moderately but reliably lower acceptability ratings, with a mean near 3.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Violin plot of judgments obtained in acceptability study on attributive comparatives. The large dot represents the mean, and is surrounded by a 95% confidence interval

Full size image

An ANOVA calculated over a linear regression model of the acceptability judgments including verb, type of gradable predicate, and their interaction yields an estimated probability of 0.84 for the null hypothesis that there is no main effect of verb, and of 0.56 for the null hypothesis that there is no interaction between verb and type of gradable predicate. On the other hand, a highly significant effect of gradable predicate was detected (p<0.0001), such that quantity comparatives without de received lower ratings than those with de and lower ratings than comparable quality comparatives.

Discussion.

These results support the conclusion that both quality and quantity comparatives are genuinely acceptable in Mandarin. We found no evidence that the semantic class of the governing verb impacts the acceptability of adnominal quality or quantity comparatives.

Appendix B: Materials for the experiment on scope interaction

The experiment reported in Sect. 3.3.3 involved sentences containing a modal and a comparative. As mentioned above, we tested two necessity modals (bixu and xuyao) and two possibility modals (keyi and neng). The sentences varied in the choice of main verb and object noun (‘lexicalization’) and word order; we used three lexicalizations for the possibility modals and three different lexicalizations for the necessity modals.

The three lexicalizations for the possibility modals are shown below. Context 1 supports the comparison-of-maxima reading (e.g., The maximum possible/allowed amount of people seating at the square table is below the maximum possible amount of people seating at the round table); Context 2 supports the wide scope reading of the modal verb (e.g., It is possible/allowed that the amount of people seating at the glass table is below the amount of people seating at the wooden table). The modal verb is highlighted in bold, and the main verb is underlined. Each sentence could appear in one of the three word-orders.

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The three lexicalizations for the necessity modals are shown below. Context 1 supports the comparison-of-minima reading (e.g., The minimum required amount of water of the small water boiler is below that of the big water boiler); Context 2 supports the wide scope reading of the modal verb (e.g., It is required that the water added to the glass water boiler is less than the water added to the iron water boiler).

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Two sentences were constructed to serve as attention checks. We endeavored to ensure that these examples carried the same degree of complexity as the other sentences being tested, to ensure that participants are giving the amount of attention necessary to process sentences of that complexity. Each attention check item is associated with an expected range of responses.

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Finally, there were two filler items, each associated with a modal verb and lexicalization. For each filler item, three different word orders were tested, so there were six filler sentences in total. The filler sentences involve modals and positive antonyms, and all six sentences were presented to the participant. The two filler items are give as below. One uses the possibility modal neng ‘can’, and the other uses the necessity modal xuyao ‘need’. All sentences use the same gradable predicate duo ‘many’.

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Gong, Y., Coppock, E. Is degree abstraction a parameter or a universal? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese. Nat Lang Semantics 32, 177–230 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09217-w

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