Abstract
Based on the contrastive research on Korean and Chinese comparatives, this paper examines the degree abstraction parameter (Beck et als. 2004), which has widely been accepted as an account for cross-linguistic variations of comparatives. This paper argues that both Korean and Chinese allow clausal comparatives as well as phrasal comparatives, thereby involving a comparison predicate either with ‘individual comparison’ or with ‘degree comparison’, which cannot be expected from the degree abstraction parameter. Despite sharing these essential characteristics, Chinese, in contrast to Korean, does not permit attributive comparatives nor it allows those with object comparison standards. These major contrasts rather should be explained by resorting to an individual morpho-syntactic feature of a certain element which participates in forming comparatives.
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