Abstract
This work focuses on the adjectival construction and some degree modifications in Mandarin Chinese. Adjective is a special grammatical category in that its interpretation, in most cases, does not stay constant and varies from context to context. In order to determine the truth value of a sentence containing an adjective, we have to know what the comparison class is and capture the standard of comparison in advance. However, not every adjective requires a context for the determination of its value. Some adjectives, such as dirty, open, straight, etc, have their inherent scale structures encoded with a certain kind of value, which may be maximum or minimum. Due to the fact that different adjectives have different scale structures, the combinations of these adjectives and degree modifiers will cause many different results. In this work, I start with the discussion of the relation between the adjectival construction and the degree modifier gou ‘enough’ and the dao- clause. Von Stechow (1984) proposes that in English adjectival constructions can have a covert element pos to saturate and restrict the degree argument of the adjectives. However, C.- S. Liu (2005) proposes that Mandarin Chinese is not like English in that it does not have a covert element to saturate the degree argument of an adjective. The only way to complete the saturation of the degree argument of an adjective is to resort to some overt element, such as the sentence final particle le, reduplication, or contrastive focus. Based on the analyses mentioned above and the concept that gradable adjectives denote relations between individuals and degrees proposed in Seuren (1973), Creswell (1977), Hellan (1981), Klein (1991), Kennedy (1999), and Kennedy& McNally (2005), I propose that the incompatibility between gou ‘enough’ and the dao- clause in the same sentence can be accounted for by the fact that there is only one adjective in the sentence whose degree argument needs to be saturated. Another issue addressed in this paper is the contrast between two different comparative constructions, one being the comparative construction containing the lexical item bi ‘than’, and the other the construction that does not contain bi ‘than’. An analysis different from the one proposed by C.- Zhao (2005) is given, which states that the differences between these two kinds of comparative constructions are associated with the presence or absence of the lexical item bi ‘than’. I account for the contrasts between these two constructions employing the light verb COMPARE.