题目：Universal Quantification in Mandarin

报告人：刘明明（清华大学 外国语文学系）

摘要：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 the propositions in what the speaker takes to be the Question under Discussion (or subject matter). 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 the question of which of its individual instantiations are true. The proposal finally predicts a more nuanced distribution of obligatory-dou, sensitive to discourse contexts.

时间：12月1日 15:10-18:00

地点：二教413