Chapter 4 The V-duo Construction as an Atypical Comparative Construction
4.4 A Covert Positive Morpheme Pos in the V-duo Construction
Before going into the discussion, I shall answer the following question first. Does Chinese have a covert positive morpheme? As demonstrated extensively in Liu (2010), Chinese has a number of constructions in which the positive degree meaning is achieved covertly, including the bu ‘not’ negation sentence, the contrastive focus construction, the ma particle question, the epistemic adjectival small clause, the conditional, and sentences ending with the sentence final particle le, as shown by (82a–f), respectively.
(82) a. Zhangsan bu gao.
Zhangsan not tall
‘Zhangsan is not tall, but the possibility of Zhangsan’s being short is not excluded.’
‘*Zhangsan is not taller.’
b. Zhangsan gao, Lisi ai.
Zhangsan tall Lisi short
‘Zhangsan is tall, but Lisi is short.’
‘*Zhangsan is taller, but Lisi is shorter.’
c. Zhangsan gao ma?
Zhangsan tall SFP
‘Is Zhangsan tall?’
‘*Is Zhangsan taller?’
d. Zhangsan yaoshi linse dehua, jiu bu hui qing ni chi fan.
Zhangsan if stingy PAR then not will invite you eat rice
‘If Zhangsan is stingy, he will not treat you to dinner.’
‘*If Zhangsna is more stingy, he will not treat you to dinner.’
e. Zhangsan xiao ni ben.
Zhangsan deride you stupid
‘Zhangsan derided you as being stupid.’
‘*Zhangsan derided you as being more stupid.’
f. Hua hong le.
flower red SFP
‘The flower got red.’
‘*The flower got redder.’
Liu (2010) argues that in each of these sentences, positive semantics is provided by a
covert positive morpheme pos. According to Liu (2010), the semantic interpretation of a bu
‘not’ negation sentence containing a simple adjectival predicate like (82a) implies that Chinese does have a covert positive morpheme. Liu (2010) suggests that example (82a) means that it is not the case that Zhangsan’s height exceeds the contextually determined standard height of human beings by a significant amount. In other words, Zhangsan’s height might exceed the contextually determined standard height but the difference between the degree value of Zhangsan’s height and the standard height is not significant, and this does not exclude the possibility of Zhangsan’s being short, as the grammaticality of (83) shows.
(83) Zhangsan bu gao, shijishang Zhangsan suan shi ai de.
Zhangsan not tall actually Zhangsan consider is short DE
‘Zhangsan is not tall, and actually he can be considered as being short.’
As Kennedy (2007) points out, in addition to the contextually dependent interpretations, the positive form of gradable adjectives shows another semantic characteristic: it establishes an ordering between objects x and y with respect to gradable property g denoted by the positive form, and g(x) must exceed g(y) by a significant amount. One option for the compositional semantics of the positive form of gradable adjectives, as Kennedy (2007) suggests, is to assume a degree morpheme pos (i.e., the covert positive morpheme) with a
denotation along the lines of (58), repeated as (84), where s is a context-sensitive function from measure function to degree which, based on properties of the adjective g and the context of utterance, further returns a value that counts as a significant degree of the relevant property in the context of utterance; namely, g(x) must exceed g(y) by a significant amount.
(84) [[Deg pos]] = λg.λx.g(x) > s(g)
Given this semantic property of the positive morpheme, Liu (2010) argues that the semantic interpretation of (82a) inspires him to analyze (82a) as (85), in which there is a degree projection headed by the pos morpheme above the adjective phrase gao ‘tall’.
(85) Zhangsan bu [DegP pos [AP gao]].
Zhangsan not tall
‘Zhangsan is not tall.’
Thus, Liu (2010) suggests that like English, Chinese has a covert positive morpheme.
Having this as basis, now let us return to the V-duo construction. Having established that the V-duo construction is an implicit comparison construction which, according to Kennedy (2007), relies on the inherent context sensitivity of the positive form, we thus assume that the
V-duo construction involves the semantics of the positive form. The compositional semantics of the positive form, as Kennedy (2005, 2007) suggests, can be derived by combining the lexical adjective with a ‘positive’ morpheme that introduces a contextual standard of comparison.
Accordingly, based on Liu’s (2010)’s argument that Chinese has a covert positive morpheme and Kennedy’s (2007)’s proposal that one option for the compositional semantics of the positive form is to assume a covert positive morpheme pos, we posit that there exists a covert positive morpheme pos in the V-duo construction, which is analyzed as an implicit comparison construction. Because V-duo is a compound verb, as argued in section 2.1, we pursue Tang’s (1991) proposal and assume that the covert positive morpheme pos is merged with or incorporated into the morpheme duo at lexical level and thus becomes part of the morpheme duo, as (86) shows.
(86)
Note that Liu (2010) argues that in Chinese the positive morpheme has two allomorphs:
one is the covert positive allomorph (i.e., the pos morpheme), and the other is its overt
counterpart hen. So is it possible that the implicit comparison in the V-duo construction is provided by the overt positive morpheme hen? This possibility is ruled out based on the following reasons.
First, if the overt positive morpheme hen is adopted, this will result in a trisyllabic compound, which runs counter to the fact that V-duo is a disyllabic compound.
Second, a construction containing a verb plus hen duo like (87) differs from the V-duo construction in the following ways.
(87) Ni jiu he hen duo le.
2SG wine drink very many/much SFP
‘You drank a lot of wine.’
For one thing, hen duo ‘a lot of’ modifies the quantity of internal arguments, whereas duo
‘much’ in the V-duo construction modifies the quantity of events, as illustrated by the grammatical contrast between (88) and (89).
(88) a. *Ni lanqiu da hen duo LE.
2SG basketball play very many/much ASP/SFP b. *Ni Xiangan qu hen duo LE.
2SG Hong Kong go very many/much ASP/SFP
(89) a. Ni lanqiu da-duo LE.
2SG basketball play-much ASP/SFP ‘You played basketball quite a lot.’
b. Ni Xiangan qu-duo LE.
2SG Hong Kong go-much ASP/SFP ‘You went to Hong Kong quite a lot.’
For another, a construction containing a verb plus hen duo is likely to be given a habitual interpretation, as shown by (90). In contrast, the V-duo construction is usually used to warn somebody against something. For example, (91) implies that drinking too much coffee may be harmful. Generally speaking, the V-duo construction conveys a negative meaning.
(90) Ta kafei he hen duo.
3SG coffee drink very many/much ‘He has the habit of drinking a lot of coffee.’
(91) Ta kafei he-duo LE.
3SG coffee drink-much ASP/SFP ‘He drank coffee quite a lot.’
4.5 The Semantic Constituents in Comparatives
According to Kennedy (2005), comparatives have the following semantic constituents (the labels are meant to be descriptive), illustrated with an example from English.
(92) TARGET OF GRADABLE COMPARATIVE STANDARD STANDARD OF COMPARISON PREDICATE MORPHEME MARKER COMPARISON
Kim (is) tall -er than Lee.
In English comparatives, the meaning of comparison is provided by the comparative morphemes more/–er, less and as specifically for the purpose of establishing orderings of superiority, inferiority and equality, respectively, the standard against which an object is compared is introduced by the morphemes than and as, and the dimension of comparison is provided by a predicate that is gradable, as illustrated by (93a-c) (cf. Kennedy 2007).
(93) a. Mercury is closer to the sun than Venus.
b. The Mars Pathfinder mission was less expensive than previous missions to Mars.
c. Uranus doesn’t have as many rings as Saturn.
In the Chinese bi comparative, the meaning of comparison is provided by the comparative morpheme bi for the purpose of establishing the ordering relation of superiority, the standard of comparison is introduced by the word bi, and the dimension of comparison is provided by a predicate that is gradable or that contains a gradable element (cf. Li and Thompson 1981), as shown by (94a-b).
(94) a. Zhangsan bi Lisi gao.
Zhangsan COM Lisi tall ‘Zhangsan is taller than Lisi.’
b. Zhangsan bi Lisi pao-de kuai.
Zhangsan COM Lisi run-DE fast ‘Zhangsan runs faster than Lisi does.’
Kennedy (2005, 2007) argues that the way that the various semantic constituents illustrated in (92) above are expressed syntactically varies quite a bit from language to language. Not all languages have comparatives that (overtly) manifest all of the constituents in (92). First, many languages lack specialized comparative morphology. Second, many languages lack specific standard markers analogous to English than.
In the V-duo construction the meaning of implicit comparison is provided by the degree morpheme pos (i.e., a covert positive morpheme) with a denotation along the lines of (58), repeated as (95), where s is a context sensitive function that takes a gradable predicate meaning as input and returns a standard of comparison appropriate for the context as output.
(95) [[Deg pos]] = λg.λx.g(x) > s(g)
The standard of comparison in the V-duo construction is neither introduced by specific syntactic categories nor overtly manifested. Instead, the contextually determined standard of comparison in the V-duo construction is introduced by the covert positive morpheme pos. The target of comparison is the event denoted by the VP. The dimension of comparison quantity is provided the gradable element duo. Thus, the V-duo construction involves comparing two events along the quantity dimension. For example, in (96) the semantics of duo requires ‘the drinking event by Zhangsan’ to exceed ‘the drinking event denoted by the context-sensitive standard’ in quantity by a significant amount.
(96) Zhangsan jiu he-duo LE.
Zhangsan wine drink-much ASP/SFP ‘Zhangsan drank wine quite a lot.’
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The syntactic and semantic properties shown by the V-duo construction can be briefly summarized as follows: (A) V-duo is a verb-complement compound verb. (B) The morpheme duo is compatible with stage-level verbs but incompatible with individual-level verbs. (C)
The morpheme duo, in general, modifies the quantity of events. (D) The events must be atelic, unbounded or cumulative. (E) The semantics of duo implies that the standard event quantity is context-sensitive.
With respect to the syntactic analysis of the V-duo construction, following Paul (2002) I argued that the object preposed to the post-subject/pre-verb position is an internal topic.
However, departing from Paul (2002), I argued that multiple topics are allowed in the internal topic position in the V-duo construction, provided they belong to different types. Since TopP recursion is available IP-internally in the V-duo construction, I argued that like the external topic in the sentence-initial position, the internal topic is located in the Spec of TopicP.
Movement of a constituent which is interpreted as a Topic is basically driven by feature checking. One way of implementing this is to assume that the head Top constituent of the Topic Phrase contains an [EPP] feature and an uninterpretable topic feature, and that these
attract a maximal projection which carries a matching interpretable topic feature to move to the specifier position within the Topic Phrase (cf. Radford 2004).
This paper further argues that the V-duo construction is an implicit comparison construction. There are four reasons for this: (A) the V-duo construction expresses comparison by taking advantage of the inherent context sensitivity of the positive form of the gradable adjective duo: what counts as duo ‘much’ varies from one context to the next, and the truth conditions of the V-duo construction depend in large part on the context in which it is uttered, (B) the V-duo construction is unacceptable in contexts involving ‘crisp judgments’, (C) the V-duo construction is incompatible with differential measure phrases, and (D) the V-duo construction cannot co-occur with the word bi, which implies explicit comparison. As Kennedy (2007) points out, implicit comparison involves taking advantage of the inherent context dependence of the positive form. One account for the contextually dependent interpretations in the positive form, as Kennedy (2007) argues, is to assume a degree morpheme pos (i.e., a covert positive morpheme) with a denotation along the lines of (58), repeated here as (97):
(97) [[Deg pos]] = λg.λx.g(x) > s(g)
Here s is a context sensitive function that takes a gradable predicate meaning as input and
returns a standard of comparison appropriate for the context as output (cf. Cresswell 1977;
von Stechow 1984; Kennedy & McNally 2005).
In addition, according to Liu (2010), Chinese has a covert positive morpheme. Thus, it is not unreasonable for us to assume that the V-duo construction, as an implicit comparison construction, contains the covert positive morpheme pos, which is merged with or incorporated into the morpheme duo at lexical level because V-duo is a compound verb. The assumption that the semantics of duo is derived by merging pos with duo or by incorporating pos into duo at lexical level explains why the standard of comparison in the V-duo
construction is context-sensitive so that the event in the V-duo construction cannot be telic, bounded, or quantized.
In the V-duo construction, the meaning of implicit comparison is provided by the degree morpheme pos (i.e., a covert positive morpheme). The contextually determined standard of comparison is introduced by the covert positive morpheme pos. The target of comparison is the event denoted by the VP. The dimension of comparison quantity is provided the gradable element duo. Thus, the V-duo construction involves comparing two events along the quantity dimension.
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