Exploring comparison construction in Ndebele and Mandarin

This paper introduces the storyboard “The Twin Dilemma”, which was created to investigate how languages encode comparisons, and in particular, the comparative. The storyboard aims to elicit different kinds of comparison constructions to inform linguistic analysis. We present two narrations of the storyboard, first from Ndebele (Niger-Congo, S. Nguni; Zimbabwe), and then from Mandarin Chinese, along with some initial hypotheses as to the syntactic and semantic analysis of the comparative in these languages. Semantic Fieldwork Methods, Vol. 3 No. 1 (2021): Empson, Alice, Jiayin Ma, Siena Weingartz, and Xiaoye Wu: Exploring comparison constructions in Ndebele and Mandarin: The storyboard The Twin Dilemma