A novel argument for an even-like semantics of Mandarin dou

Abstract

There have been ongoing debates about the semantics of Mandarin particle dou, which, among its various readings, has a distributive reading and a scalar reading. In the paper, we make a novel observation that dou, on both readings, is sensitive to a standard on a scale associated with a contextually supplied gradable property, and take this to be new evidence in favor of a unified, scalar analysis of dou. To uniformly capture its two readings and its standard-sensitivity, we propose to integrate insights from two proposals, Liu 2017 and Greenberg 2018a. Specifically, on the one hand, we follow Liu 2017 in arguing that (a) dou is uniformly a scalar particle, (b) it operates on distinct types of alternatives on distinct readings and (c) a trivialization operation occurs on the distributive reading; on the other hand, we, deviating from Liu, adopt two components adapted from the gradability-based semantics originally suggested for Englishevenin Greenberg 2018a, i.e. (a) an
evaluative presupposition and (b) a contextually determined scale, instead of one based on unlikelihood. Our revised proposal can successfully account for the two readings in a unified manner but circumvents the issue regarding the dimension of the scale faced by Liu 2017 in the meanwhile.