This dissertation offers a window on the grammatical diversity of Chinese languages, hereafter referred to as Sinitic. It focuses in particular on comparative constructions of southern varieties such as Cantonese, Minnan and Hakka and compares these to northern Mandarin as well as some non- Sinitic languages of Southeast Asia. A typology of comparative constructions in Sinitic is established and their grammatical properties are described. The evolution of these constructions is discussed with particular attention for the role of language contact and their areal typology.

Three dominant types of comparatives are found in Sinitic, which divide China in three zones: south, north and southeast. The southern type is cognate to non-Sinitic varieties such as Hmong, Vietnamese and Lao as can be seen in the parallel process of grammaticalization the construction undergoes in these languages. This is yet another structural feature that defines Southeast Asia, including southern China, as a linguistic area per se. The northern type found in Mandarin is, on the other hand, quite unique both in terms of grammaticalization and word-order typology with the closest possible type found in Korean. Interference from Altaic languages is suggested on typological and historical grounds to account for this and possibly other ‘oddities’ in the grammar of Mandarin when compared to other Sinitic varieties. The southeastern type can be seen as a hybrid of the first two types described above, a fact that could define the area where it is found as a merging point of southern and northern varieties.

This work hopes to contribute to the field of typological studies of Chinese varieties, a group of languages too often ignored in terms of syntactic diversity. In deconstructing the myth of a uniform ‘Chinese’ grammar we unveil a world of considerable linguistic diversity which in its turn is only an aspect of the cultural and ethnic diversity China has to offer.