Abstract
Comparative sentences are sentences including two terms of comparison comparing the degree of a certain property. This thesis focuses on such sentences with Bi-marker in Mandarin Chinese and the related deletion operation. The systematic syntactic analysis for comparative sentences in English started from Bresnan(1973), and followed by two major approaches: adjunction and conjunction. The analysis for comparative sentences in Mandarin Chinese starts later, and analysis proposed for English comparative sentences cannot be fully applied to that for Chinese without problems.In this thesis, we have distinguished two major approaches for analyzing Chinese comparative sentences and their drawbacks, and further discussed the compatibility with other syntactic mechanism or whether there really is no counterexample. We found theoretical internal problem to analyze comparatives in coordinating structure, such as share predicate should not be allowed. On the other hand, we also found linguistic evidences of the peculiar nature that Mandarin comparative sentences allow ATB-like operation under conjunction approach, and CED-like operation under adjunction approach. We have further examined traditional testing criterion for predicate domain, and the results show not all of them are fully reliable. We conclude that adjunction approach better describes this topic at this moment.Liu(1996) proposed a structural analysis for comparative sentences in Mandarin Chinese, and we further proposed another structural analysis to complement sentence type not covered in Liu’s analysis. Shin(2003) found comparative deletion might be related to VP ellipsis and sluicing. We found that the testing criterion for VP ellipsis yield parallel results, however, there is no identical licensing condition, which shows the mechanism in behind is different. The generalized deletion mechanism proposed by Lasnik and Chomsky still need further work to include comparative deletion into its system.