Unifying Universal and Existential wh’s in Mandarin

Abstract

The paper aims at a unified account of Mandarin non-interrogative wh's that have both universal and existential uses. Wh's are argued to uniformly denote existentials obligatorily triggering alternatives, exhaustifying different types of alternatives strengthens the existentials into either universal or existential free choice items corresponding to the two uses of wh's, as is in the framework of Chierchia 2013b. Distribution and interpretation of the two types of wh's follow from their interaction with an even-like particle dou and competition between the two.

A pragmatic explanation of the mei-dou co-occurrence in Mandarin

“…As for other types of associates, wh-items, renhe 'any' and minimizers behave like mei, while bare nouns (under both definite and generic readings) pattern with plural definites (examples not exhibited due to constraints of space). This is again expected under the assumptions that wh-items, renhe and minimizers are underlyingly existential quantifiers (Liao 2011;Liu 2019c;Xiang 2020), while bare nouns denote kinds and are referential (e.g. Chierchia 1998)…”

“…In particular, reconstruction to Spec-dou amounts to scoping below dou if we adopt a two-place semantics of dou (fn. 15;Liu 2019c, cf. Wagner 2006 and use movement-specifically, to the specifier of the operator (Drubig 1994)-for focus/alternativeassociation.…”

“…where F is the denotation of dou's associate and B the denotation of the rest (Liu 2019c). 16 It is worth mentioning at this point, as suggested by a reviewer, a line of analysis that assigns an existential presupposition to even-like particles (e.g.…”