A Formal Analysis Of Chinese Comparative Correlatives

The comparative correlative is a universal linguistic phenomenon in various languages.In Chinese,it refers to“yue...yue...”construction.Within the basis of Government and Binding theory as well as some related theories in semantics,this thesis analyzes Chinese comparative correlatives from the perspective of syntax and formal semantics.Syntactically,the analysis of Chinese CCs inherits the tripartite structure of Chinese correlatives and further proposes a syntactic structure of Chinese CCs.In addition,they can be categorized into yue₁+AdjP+yue₂+AdjP;yue₁+VP+yue₂+AdjP;yue₁+AdjP+yue₂+VP;yue₁+VP+yue₂+VP;yue₁+PP+yue₂+AdjP.Semantically,the analysis suggests that yue is a degree function from the variables of time,world and individual to the comparison of degrees denoted by the predicates modified by yue,which is expressed as YUE_PREDICATE?x??t??w?.In addition,this analysis further categorizes yue into three semantic types of<<e,t>,<e,t>>?<<t,t>,<t,t>>?<<<e,t>,<e,t>>,<<e,t>,<e,t>>>.When yue modifies a predicate or an attribute,yue is of type<<e,t>,<e,t>>;when yue modifies a sentence-modifying adverbial in an adverbial phrase,yue is of type<<t,t>,<t,t>>;when yue modifies a predicate-modifying adverbial,yue is of type<<<e,t>,<e,t>>,<<e,t>,<e,t>>>.Thus,the thesis provides a strong evidence for the multiple mappings from syntax to semantics for the correlative item yue has syntactically only one part of speech but three different semantic types,decided by the type of the yue phrase.