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Chinese comparatives and their implicational parameters

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Abstract

This paper argues that superiority comparatives in Mandarin Chinese are all phrasal comparatives that can be directly interpreted, and makes a new suggestion of taking the bǐ-phrase (‘compare-phrase’) to be an adjunct and one constituent, but with bǐ-shells. This syntactic analysis allows one to combine into one phrase various compared constituents that would otherwise not be analyzed as forming a phrase by themselves. Semantically, in extension of work by Heim as well as Bhatt and Takahashi, bǐ is taken to compare two sequences of arguments of a gradable predicate along the dimension given by that predicate. It is also suggested that comparatives across languages may be subject to three parameters: (i) argument-dependent comparison vs. non-argument dependent comparison, (ii) phrasal comparison vs. clausal comparison, and (iii) monoadic comparison vs. dyadic comparison.

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  1. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 Ta Hsueh Road, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan, ROC

    Jo-wang Lin

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Lin, Jw. Chinese comparatives and their implicational parameters. Nat Lang Semantics 17, 1–27 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9033-3

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