Deriving The Bi-Comparatives In Mandarin Chinese

The study of the comparative construction has been one of the major topics in the generative tradition. However, compared with the extensive work on English comparative construction, relatively little has been done on the Mandarin Chinese counterpart, whose typical representation is the bi-comparatives. Our study is an effort to shed some light on the Chinese comparative construction, notably its classification and derivation.Our proposal is that there are two kinds of bi-comparatives in Modern Mandarin Chinese, the Explicit Bi-Comparatives (henceforth EBC) and the Implicit Bi-Comparatives (henceforth IBC), depending on the presence/absence of gradable adjectives/verbs in the sentence. We focus on the former, trying to account for its structure and derivation. Firstly, we will argue, based on its syntactic performance, that bi in EBC is in fact a verb meaning "exceed". Then we will argue that EBC is base-generated with a bi-clausal structure which is subject to a deletion process regulated by the Directionality Constraint described in Huang (1991b). In our semantic analysis, EBC is shown to manifest a perfect match between syntax and semantics. The identity of the other kind of bi-comparatives, IBC, is confirmed by its syntactic performance which is distinct from EBC. We will not delve into the derivation of IBC, only proposing that it may be the result of some incorporation process. Grammaticalisation studies support our distinction.