A Cross-Linguistic Study On Comparative Markers Of Northeast Asian Languages

From the linguistic typological view, the thesis is devoted to investigating the comparative constructions in the Northeast Asian languages. The comparative category is divided into three sub-categories, which is comparison of inequality, comparison of attainment and equative by the author.Understanding the various kinds of comparative standard markers in languages of the world, it makes research on the standard markers in Northeast Asian languages.It discusses the semantic functional distribution of standard markers of three sub comparative categories in Chinese dialects, and builds semantic maps by the distribution. These semantic maps reveal which of the meanings is more closely related with each comparative marker. On the background of cognitive perspective, the dissertation explains how these markers could become the comparative markers.The thesis also surveys the sources of comparison of inequality markers in languages of minority in China,and gives an explanation for the semantic mechanism through which certain source could be used as the comparative standard markers.The author makes a contrastive analysis on the meaning of comparative constructions (or the negation of comparative constructions) between Korean, Japanese and Chinese as well.Finally, it refers to the semantic overlapping phenomenon between the comparison of inequality and equative markers in Chinese dialects. Built on this phenomenon, the thesis makes further cross-linguistic research on the hierarchy of markedness between the comparison of inequality constructions and equative constructions...