Speaker: Haoming Li & Zhouyi Sun (MIT)
Title: Mandarin clausal comparatives involve standard embedding
Time: Tuesday, April 25th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Erlewine (2018) argues that the Mandarin bi comparative is a form of clausal comparative. Since clausal comparatives are generally analyzed as involving degree abstraction (Bresnan 1973; Heim 2000; Bhatt and Pancheva 2004, a.o.), yet Mandarin is held by many to lack degree abstraction (Beck et al. 2009; Krasikova 2008; Erlewine 2018), a contradiction seems to arise. Erlewine reconciles the conflicting points by arguing that clausal comparatives are possible as long as we adopt a coordinate relation between the two clauses and employ ‘Degree Last’ gradable predicates, which he claims is precisely the case for Mandarin bi comparatives.
In this talk, we present several novel arguments in favor of the proposal that the syntactic structure of bi comparatives involve an embedding relation between the two clauses rather than a coordinate relation. We further illustrate the necessity of degree abstraction for an embedding approach. This lends support to the argument that Mandarin does indeed have degree abstraction (Gong and Coppock 2021), and casts doubt on the proposal of the ‘Degree Abstraction Parameter’ (DAP) (Beck et al. 2004).