| Comparative construction is an important semantic category in all human languages. Guided by the idea of combining studies on Chinese and non-Chinese, this thesis, by means of doing field work, conducting questionnaires, and looking up in references, probes into the comparative construction of Sino-Tibetan language phylum, including its structure, markers, diachronic development and typological features, etc.. It manages to reveal the components and ellipsis of comparative construction in a variety of Sino-Tibetan languages, examine the types, origin and models of markers as well as evolving principles of diachronic development of comparative construction, and finally discusses its features and changes from the angle of typology and language contact. The full-text is divided into six chapters, and the main content of each chapter are described as follows.Chapter 1 briefly introduces major underlying forces of initiating the thesis, the object, scope, ideas and measures, significance and value of the research, sources of materials and ways of data collecting.Chapter 2 gives an overview of the related previous research. The thesis summarizes the research results concerning comparative construction and comparative category, including general studies on Chinese comparative construction and comparative category, monographic studies on comparative construction of both Chinese and ethnic minority languages, and comparative studies on comparative construction between Chinese and Foreign languages. Of all the studies, the achievement of comparative construction of Chinese is the most fruitful, involving components, negative forms, and diachronic development of comparative construction, comparative construction of Chinese dialects, typological features and acquisition of comparative construction of Chinese, monographic studies on comparative construction of ethnic minority languages is known in a small quantity of languages like the Tibetan language, the Yi language, the Buyi language, the Zhuang language and the Jingpo language, etc.. Some related grammatical phenomenon in non-Chinese are just found sporadically in various Reference Grammars and Brief Records of Ethnic Minorities'Languages. Comparisons on comparative construction between Chinese and foreign languages are mainly restricted to Chinese-English, Chinese-Japanese, Chinese-French and Chinese-Korean, etc.. Comparative studies on that of Chinese-minority languages are few and far between. Chapter 3 explores the constituents of comparative construction in the Sino-Tibetan language phylum, pointing out a complete comparative construction comprises 8 parameters, namely comparative owner, subject, comparative standard, comparative marker, comparative point, special comparative item, comparative result and comparative D-value. Due to the semantic and cognitive relations, some parameters can be absent in sentence patterns. But constant parameters are subject, standard, comparative marker, and comparative result. This chapter makes emphasis on the implication and appearance of subject, including the implication of subject and its causes, the present and on-the-spot implication of subject, ellipsis of comparative standard and its restrictions, nature of comparative point, the setting of comparative point and special comparative item, similarities and differences of comparative objects, forms of comparative D-value, and syntactic constituent and semantic restriction of comparative result.Chapter 4 discusses comparative markers in Sino-Tibetan language phylum. This part makes a scientific classification about comparative construction. They fall into two general categories:the marked and the unmarked. Beneath this classification, there exist five sub-categories according to the distribution, grammatical nature and numbers of markers, and the marked object as well. The chapter presents the origin of comparative makers and their grammatical scales, providing the pattern of superiority comparison with markers in Sino-Tibetan languages. This part summarizes the models for grouping markers and the priority scale of choices of markers, and at the same time proposes the differences and causes of simultaneous use and overlapping of comparative markers of comparative construction of Sino-Tibetan languages.Chapter 5 relates evolving history and developing level of comparative construction of Sino-Tibetan language phylum form the viewpoint of diachronic evolution, and explores the origin of the comparative markers and their developing process, replacement of Chinese comparative markers, and consequently, the shifts, causes and mechanism of Chinese comparative forms. Because of the lack of historical documents about a major amount of Sino-Tibetan languages, this chapter discusses three main types of comparative construction in these Sino-Tibetan languages on basis of the borrowed forms from Chinese.Chapter 6 focuses on comparative construction of Sino-Tibetan languages from the cross-linguistic perspective. The chapter aims to:first, focus on the importance and need of combining studies on Chinese and non-Chinese; secondly, inquire into formation mechanism of markers of prepositional and postpositional type; thirdly, point out universals and differences between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages which are distinctive from the former; fourthly, analyze the divergence of studies on Chinese comparative construction as well as its causes; fifthly, put it forward that Chinese comparative construction is different from the other languages from the perspective of linguistic typology; and lastly, survey changes of comparative construction in Sino-Tibetan languages from the perspective of the language contact.The Conclusion sums up the full text of the thesis and points out defects of the research.The bibliography and sample sentences of each language family of Sino-Tibetan language phylum are appended to the thesis.
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