Does Mandarin dou ever have rightward associates?

Bartos, Huba (2015) Does Mandarin dou ever have rightward associates? In: The 6th CASS-IL International Roundtable of Linguistics, 2015.11.05-2015.11.08, Suzhou.

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Abstract

The Mandarin quantificational adverb dou 都 is well-known for its versatility: it occurs in a wide variety of constructions, and has a wide range of s emantic and pragmatic contributions to the meaning of the clause it occurs in, ranging from un iversal quantification, through even- type focusing, to clearly pragmatic-attitudinal functions. This pa per targets a relatively narrow segment of this wid e spectrum: those use of dou where (i) it is used with universal quantification al force, and/but (ii) the linguistic expression often associated with its qua ntification domain in the literature appears to its right in the clause, as opposed to the much more usual s cenario of its associate taking a position to its left . It is shown that the alleged associates to its ri ght are in fact not its true associates syntactically, at least not in the manner that its leftward associates are: (i) the ’personal pronoun’ construction in fact complies with the LC, making u se of covert elements; (ii) in the ’kind-denoting N P’ construction the associate of dou , providing it with a variable to bind, is the VP, rather than the kind- denoting NP; (iii) in the ’wh-pronoun’ construction dou is an adverb functioning as a discourse particle, it takes no associate, binds no variable, but modifies the meaning of the question by adding two congruency requirements (plurality, exhaustivit y). Some remaining questions are addressed in a very tentative manner in an Appendix.

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