Degrees are accessed indirectly? A new look at Chinese 'bi'-comparatives

Abstract

Two aspects of Chinese adjectival bi-comparatives (bi-comparatives) remain underexplored. First, a critical morphosyntactic difference between bare (i.e., those without differential phrases) and differential (i.e., those with differential phrases) bi-comparatives is that the morpheme chu, literally meaning ‘beyond/exceed’, is exclusively licensed in the latter, but not in the former. Second, bi-comparatives do not freely allow measure phrases (MPs) as the standard of comparison unless there are sufficiently specific contexts. These observations are taken as indications that degrees may only be accessible in some constructions. I propose that (i) bare bi-comparatives do not characterize an ordering of degrees, but a directed scale segment (Schwarzschild, 2020); and (ii) while characterizing a directed segment, differential bi-comparatives allow the mapping of the segment onto a degree specified by the differential phrase, a role fulfilled by chu (à la Wellwood, 2015). Taken together, Chinese bi-comparatives may constitute a case where degrees are not encoded in the lexical semantics of gradable adjectives, but introduced via a functional morpheme (Wellwood, 2015; Bochnak et al., 2020).