A traditional controversy in Chinese syntax is whether Chinese has an independent category of adjectives. In recent years, some researchers give a negative answer to the question based on evidence from crosslinguistic analyses. Their major arguments include the following (see McCawley 1992 among others): First, unlike English adjectives, the complex forms of the alleged adjectives in Chinese can not combine directly with nouns; Second, adjectives in Chinese cannot be distinguished from verbs since they exhibit an equal degree of "closeness" with which its members combine with degree and comparative elements; Third, the socalled adjectives in Chinese can function as the predicate like verbs, whereas adjectival predicates in English must be introduced by a copula. This paper argues that none of the aforementioned arguments is valid. More specifically, it is pointed out in the paper that (a) the fact that complex adjectives in Chinese cannot combine directly with nouns is better attributed to the fact that the
combinations are systematic compounds in Chinese and, as a result, the adjective in the combination cannot be modified or negated in accordance with the Lexical Integrity Principle;(b) Chinese is not the only language in having just one set of adverbs, as such, the fact that adjectives and verbs have the same closeness relationship with degree and comparative elements should not be const rued as suggesting the lack of adjectives in Chinese; (c) As for the fact that Chinese adjectives can function as independent predicates, it is pointed out that whether adjectival predicates need to be introduced by copula is determined by how tense/aspect is encoded in the language, a copula is needed for adjectival predicates only in languages that encode tense/aspect with inflectional features, but not in languages that express the tense/aspect features with verbal suffixes. Consequently, the issue has no bearing on the status of adjectives in Chinese. It is therefore concluded in the paper that, despite argument to the contrary, crosslinguistic evidence does suggest the existence of adjectives in Chinese as an independent category, and that they have very much the same categorical properties as adjectives in other languages, the differences being reducible to that of the inflectional morphology of their respective languages.