Exploring comparison constructions in Ndebele and Mandarin: The storyboard 'The Twin Dilemma'
Abstract
This paper introduces the storyboard “The Twin Dilemma,” which was created to investigate how languages encode comparisons, and in particular, comparative constructions. The storyboard aims to elicit different kinds of comparison constructions to inform linguistic analysis. We present two narrations of the storyboard, first from Ndebele (NigerCongo, Bantu; Zimbabwe), and then from Mandarin Chinese, along with some initial hypotheses as to the syntactic and semantic analysis of the comparative in these languages.
Here are our storyboards for the article “Exploring comparison constructions in Ndebele and Mandarin: The storyboard The Twin Dilemma”!
- Cecilia and Verna are twins. They live with their parents in a big house.
- One day, Mom was talking about the twins…
- But Dad couldn’t remember which twin was Cecilia and which twin was Verna!
- “Who is taller?” asked Dad.
- “Cecilia is taller than Verna,” Mom said.
- “But how much taller is Cecilia than Verna?” Dad asked.
- “Cecilia is two cm than Verna,” Mom replied.
- “But I’m the tallest!” Dad laughed.
- “Hm, Cecilia is a better musician than Verna,” Mom said.
- “But Verna is as pretty as Cecilia.”
- “Hm, and Cecilia eats more than Verna,” Mom said.
- “But I eat the most!” Dad replied.
- Dad still didn’t know which twin was Cecilia and which twin was Verna.
- Cecilia and Verna had a great idea!
- “We could wear different colour dresses,” they said.
- Now Dad knows which twin is Cecilia and which twin is Verna!
Xiaoye Wu
DPhil Student in Linguistics
My research interests include experimental phonetics, language documentation and speech perception.