A Study on the Syntactic Characteristics of Bare Comparative Constructions in Modern Chinese

Abstract

Mandarin Chinese has an unmarked comparative construction(bare comparative), [NP1+Adj+NP2+MP] (NP1 = comparee, Adj = adjective, NP2 = standard, MP = measure phrase), which lacks an overt comparative marker such as bi (比). This paper aims to demonstrate that this construction is not an elliptical variant of marked comparative constructions such as the bi-comparative, but rather an independent construction with its own form-meaning pairing. Analysis of corpus-extracted examples shows that the adjectives occurring in the unmarked comparative construction are largely restricted to monosyllabic dimensional adjectives (DA, in Bierwisch’s sense) associated with conventional measurement systems, and that these adjectives can be classified into six categories based on the comparative meaning produced by the construction: age, body/space, time/sequence, ability/evaluation, social hierarchy, and quantity/ratio. The measure phrase was found to occur in nearly all examples, indicating that it is an obligatory element for the construction to be well-formed, while the overwhelmingly dominant use of the numeral yi (一) suggests that the measure phrase in this construction is specialized for marking a cognitively minimal difference rather than a precise numerical value. Drawing on Goldberg’s Construction Grammar, this paper argues that the comparative meaning of the unmarked comparative construction is not compositionally derived from the individual meanings of the adjective and the measure phrase but is generated at the level of the construction itself. Furthermore, through an analysis of token frequency and type frequency, this paper seeks to show that the construction exhibits partial productivity, taking the form of a core-periphery structure in which meaning radiates outward from a small set of core adjectives—such as da (大), xiao (小), and gao (高)—to adjacent semantic categories.