On the predicative use of Chinese gradable adjectives

•An adjective predicate sentence may be unable to stand alone.•Incompleteness is from the lack of a comparison standard to anchor the comparison by.•Incompleteness also occurs due to syntactic invisibility of a comparison standard.•A gradable adjective maps a degree argument from its lexical semantics into syntax.•The degree argument must be subject to operator/contextual binding and referential.