Abstract
Mandarin universal terms such as mei-NPs in preverbal positions usually require the presence of dou ‘all/even’. This motivates the widely accepted idea from Lin (1998) that Mandarin does not have genuine (distributive) universal quantifiers, and mei-NPs are disguised plural definites, which thus need dou – a distributive operator (or an adverbial universal quantifier in Lee 1986, Pan 2006) – to form a universal statement. This paper defends the opposite view that mei-NPs are true universal quantifiers while dou is not. Dou is truth-conditionally vacuous but carries a presupposition that its prejacent is the strongest among its alternatives (Liu 2017). The extra presupposition triggers Maximize Presupposition (Heim 1991), which dictates that [dou S] blocks [S] whenever dou’s presupposition is satisfied. This explains the mei-dou co-occurrence, if mei-NPs are universal quantifiers normally triggering individual alternatives (thus stronger than all the other alternatives). The proposal finally predicts a more nuanced distribution of obligatory-dou, sensitive to discourse contexts.
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