On the semantics of dou and other universal quantifiers in Chinese

Haihua Pan (City University of Hong Kong)
On the semantics of dou and other universal quantifiers in Chinese

Abstract: This talk explores the semantics of Mandarin dou, arguing that its different uses can be unified under the notion of universal quantification. Also, the behaviors of other universal quantificational expressions in Mandarin are discussed based on the analysis of dou. There is abundant research on the semantics of dou in the literature, where it is treated as a sum operator over events, a marker of anti-expectation, a maximality operator, a distributive operator or a marker of high degrees/large amounts. We argue that the aforementioned analyses uncover either a facet or a variant of universal quantification. The broad notion of universal quantification can inter-connect these analyses and explain the diverse uses of dou in a more unified way. We will show that the analysis of dou as a sum operator over events is by nature not at odds with the treatment of dou as a universal quantifier. Due to its universal force, dou can relate the VP denotation to each member of a plurality and hence brings forth distributivity. Although both universal quantification and a maximization operation operate on each member of a plurality, the maximality approach to dou is inadequate since maximization over the nominal domain cannot endow the relevant sentences with a distributive interpretation and fails to account for the focus sensitivity of dou. Furthermore, a dou-sentence can convey unexpectedness and exhaustivity. In such cases, the contribution of dou is still the universal force and the different effects are attributed to the variance in the quantificational mapping of dou.