Adopting Borer’s (2005a) theory of lexical decomposition, it is argued that nongradable and gradable adjectives are distinguished in the structure. Following den Dikken, Gu and Guo (2010), a formal uninterpretable feature (for ‘comparative’) associated with adjectives is motivated to capture the interpretational differences of adjectives in different contexts, and the Deg head with a matching feature projects DegP to provide the feature checking domain for the structure to converge. Chinese adjectives are argued to form an independent category, different structurally from verbs in the attributive and predicative uses but parallel to nouns and verbs in the phrase structure. In the first part (Chapter 2 – Chapter 5), a structure based criterion for lexical categorization proposed by Baker (2003) is justified and adopted.
Working within the generative paradigm and incorporating the feature theory in the minimalist program (Chomsky 1995) into the study, this thesis addresses the following issues of adjectives: the categorial status, the attributive and predicative uses, the phrase structure, and the internal structure and derivation of comparative constructions. The area of study in this thesis is the adjectival domain in Chinese.
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