Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, 2010.
“Independent Dependency in the Mandarin bǐ comparative.”
Presented at the MIT Workshop on Comparatives.
Recent analyses of the Mandarin bi comparative (Xiang 2005, Erlewine 2007, Lin 2009) assume a "direct analysis" à la Heim (1985) whereby the semantics of the comparative applies the single gradable predicate to both the standard and the target. In this talk I present a slew of evidence for syntactic dependencies (movement chains) which exist simultaneously between the predicate and the target and between the predicate and the standard. Both the target and the standard are thus shown to be independently dependent on the predicate of comparison—a hypothesis I dub "Independent Dependency."