Syntactic Derivation Of Bi-comparatives In Mandrin Chinese

The paper reanalyses bi-comparatives in Mandarin Chinese on the basis of traditional studies and generative grammar ones, including its syntactic type re-analysis, category of "bi", its syntactic structure with new theory and series of explanation which can not be explained well by other theories.The first question is its syntactic type. Under Binding Conditions, Mandarin Chinese, like "than" clause in English, has clausal and phrasal comparatives as well. But the relationship between these two types is different from English:it is paralleling rather than deductive.The second question is category of "bi", which is one of innovation points in this paper. There are many views on this problem:pronoun, verb, coverb, conjunction, and complementizer. However, these previous studies are not so persuasive that hands of important facts go beyond their work. Under Huang(1997,2008)&Lin(2001), our conclusion is that "bi" is a light verb (eventuality predicate) rather than a verb or a pronoun.The most vital one is syntactic construction of bi-comparatives, the second innovation point in this article. The whole predicate of bi-comparatives consists of "bi+Standard" and adjectives or verbs. And bi-comparative is a vP-Shell with three functional heads, which are HOLD, Bi, Deg, designingθ-role respectively to each NPs——HOLD to experiencer, Bi to dative and Deg to theme.