Chinese quantifier scope, concord, and Lexical Resource Semantics

Abstract

This paper considers Chinese quantifier scope, an important, outstanding area of Chinese linguistics. In particular, there are two open questions on the subject: (1) the guiding principles that determine (a) the scopal readings of quantifiers and (b) the sometimes mandatory co-occurrence of the universal quantifier mei (every) and the universal adverb dou, and (2) the semantic functions of mei and dou and their connection to the co-occurrence of these words.

We reappraise three prior accounts of these subjects, reason through their consequences on some exemplary data, offer a new explanation based upon concord, a mechanism that is commonplace in many languages, and formulate it in lexical resource semantics (LRS). We use two principles adapted from Richter and Sailer's (2004) analysis of negative concord, expanded with a new quantifier order constraint to generate a coherent answer to the two aforementioned questions.