汉语“比”字比较句的句法和语义问题

The syntax and semantics of Mandarin bi comparatives

汉语"比"字比较句要求比较目标和比较标准满足平行性条件;比较句中的反身代词"自己"允许宽泛解读;比较句呈现重构效应。这些现象对短语比较分析和伴随结构分析提出了挑战,但可以在子句比较中得到直观的处理。在句法上,"比"字比较句的底层结构是"[比较目标[比较谓词]]比[比较标准[比较谓词]]",其中的比较谓词在句法生成中发生了受语义等同条件驱动的平行删除操作;在语义上,"比"是连接程度的二元谓词,表示程度之间不对称的顺序关系。

This paper reexamines three phenomena about Mandarin bi comparatives:(1) the target must agree with the standard on syntactic category and semantic features;(2) the reflexive ziji‘self'in bi comparatives allows sloppy interpretation; and(3) the bi comparatives display some reconstruction effects.While posing problems for phrasal and comitative analyses, these phenomena can be straightforwardly accounted for in clausal analysis which involves two instances of the predicate of comparison in the syntactic derivation. On this account, the predicate of comparison in the target clause undergoes parallel ellipsis for its semantic identity with the standard clause, and the comparison lies in the two degree values denoted by the target clause and the standard clause respectively.