A Semantic Study On The Comparative Structure ’A + You + B + (name) + D’ In Mandarin Chinese

Being an important category in natural language,comparison also serves as a way of thinking in human cognition to understand the world.Comparative structures have been a hot-investigated topic in linguistics,thanks to their pervasiveness.In Mandarin Chinese,the most discussed,profoundly studied and typical comparative structure is Bi comparison,whereas the less investigated structure A + You + B +(name)+ D(You comparative/comparison for short),embraces a number of forms with rich semantic meanings.This thesis figures out the comparative mode of You comparison and explores its semantic mechanism.Additionally,based on its syntax and formal semantics,a persuading answer to the asymmetrical acceptance of comparative value represented by name in both You comparison and Bi comparison is provided.The research questions are:1.Do You comparatives in Mandarin Chinese express individual comparison or do they express degree comparison?2.What semantic mechanism does You comparatives in Mandarin Chinese demonstrate in terms of their acceptance of the comparative value name?This thesis introduces the concept of degree into the study of comparative structures,uses induction and deduction together with comparative analysis based on corpus and predicate logic in formal semantics to observe differences,formulate syntactic structures and explain semantic mechanisms according to characteristics of You comparatives in a comprehensive manner.As truth condition comparison with cognitive objectivity,You comparison denotes comparative relations relying on certain logic rules.Having generalized the syntactic and semantic properties of You comparatives in Mandarin Chinese,this thesis has the following findings: first,You comparatives are devoid of the morphemes more/-er illustrated by English.Besides,multi-perspectival comparisons encoded in comparative sub-deletion patterns are robustly ungrammatical in You comparison.As a phrasal comparative structure,its syntax does not include the binding of degree variables.The above linguistic evidence demonstrates that You comparatives lack degree abstraction and hence express ordering between arbitrary comparative target A and comparative standard B along a common dimension D.It is individual comparison rather than degree comparison.Second,being different from the most discussed Bi comparatives,You comparison gives birth to the ‘≥’ comparative relation between A and B,which asserts that A equals or exceeds B with respect to their degrees on the dimension determined by D,as a result of the word You that embraces existence,possession and comparison meaning is entwined with the covert ontological-derived degree indicator ‘as a lower interval of’ in the higher [Spec,Deg P].By contrast,empirical data suggest that the Bi comparison expresses one of the two comparison items exceeds the other,and it is an obvious ‘>’ relation.Third,the comparative value name has four fundamental functions in comparison: first,the dominated demonstrativeness referring to the degree of comparative target;second,substitution resulting from an emitted comparative standard;third,semantic coercion wiping out the ‘>’ option;fourth,to indicate an exaggerated tone and the speaker’s subjective attitude.They are compatible with the semantics of You comparatives but not with Bi comparatives instead,owing to name empowers comparative predicate D to indicate discrete quantity.This difference is based on the following linguistic facts: the semantic asymmetry of the negative structures of the two comparative patterns,the different receptivity of a differential measure phrase,and the deletion of comparative standard.This thesis is of significance to understand the semantics of You comparison,provide theoretical new insights from its comparative mode and the formal analytic perspective,and better promote human cognition on degrees ordering and comparative semantics.