https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/
This seminar titled "Much Ado About "dou" [all/even] in Mandarin Chinese" was given by Yan Jiang (SOAS) on 15 November 2016 at the Linguistics Department at SOAS University of London.

Find out more about this event at https://goo.gl/GlSTqb

"dou" (都) as an adverb of quantification in Mandarin Chinese poses several descriptive problems.

The first problem pertains to dou's core meaning, as it is said to denote several disparate senses: dou¹ = universal quantification, dou² = even, and dou³ = already. I argued in Jiang (1998)* that these three senses should be treated as one "dou" and showed how dou² and dou³ could be derived from the semantic characterization of dou¹.

The second problem relates to the target of dou's quantificational force. It is not clear why "dou" can only quantify to its left and why rightward quantification of "dou" always leads to anomaly.

The third problem concerns the restrictive applicability of dou-quantification, which is only applied to quantities that are subjectively taken to be large in number.

In this talk, I review major attempts since Jiang (1998) in dealing with these problems, showing how descriptive problems have evolved into a topic in formal linguistic studies, leading to the publications of over a hundred papers and dissertations.

* Jiang, Yan. (1998) Pragmatic Reasoning and Syntactic/Semantic Characterization of "Dou". Modern Foreign Languages 01/1998; Vol. 79(1):10-24. [in Chinese]

About the speaker
Yan JIANG is a lecturer in linguistics and the languages of China at the Department of Linguistics, SOAS. His current research interests are (i) the design of a new theory of counterfactuals that can account for the non-canonical kinds used in Chinese languages, (ii) Shanghainese as shown by the grammar books, lexicons, textbooks and bible translations of missionary linguists in the 19th century, (iii) pragmatic analysis of some unique rhetoric figures.