On Dou-Quantification And Its Related Issues

The syntactic and semantic behavior of dou has always been controversial and has engendered a considerable amount of literature in Syntax, Semantics and Chinese descriptive grammar. As is observed in Chinese, a plural NP in a pre-verbal position of a sentence containing dou is interpreted differently with respect to distributivity from the plural NP in the same position of a sentence without dou. Chinese descriptive grammar regards dou as an adverb of scope denoting totality. While scholars abroad tend to explore the nature of dou from the perspectives of formal syntax or formal semantics. Some regard dou as an adverb of quantifier, some as a floating quantifier and some as an existential quantifier. This thesis gives a formal syntactic analysis of dou within the framework of the Minimalist Program, taking dou as the head of a functional projection of distributivity. The semantic properties of dou and the derivation of dou-quantification in simple sentences is explained. Following Stowell and Beghelli (1995), many linguists have shown that the postulation of DistP as a functional projection is quite compatible with the study of Chinese dou. DistP lies between IP and VP. In order to get a distributive reading, the head of DistP must be occupied by an overt element and dou just plays the role. Only the NP which checks the distributive feature against dou in the [Spec, DistP] position can get the distributive reading. Since the semantics of dou sentence requires that dou-quantifiable NPs must occur to the left of dou at the sentece level, the syntactic and semantic constraints on these potential targets need summarizing. The other related issue is whether more than one plural NP in the pre-verbal position can get distributive reading from dou at the same time. The empirical evidence has shown that dou may associate with any of one but not all/both of them simultaneously. We notice that different types of plural NP have different attraction to dou and dou tends to associate with the stronger target. We call this attraction a kind of monopolization force that determines the monopolization on dou by the target. As a result, dou only associates with the plural NP which has stronger monopolization force. The formal syntactic analysis may explain it like this: Dou, as an overtly realized distributive element, has a strong [+Distr] feature that must be checked off before the Spell-Out. By spec-head agreement, the strong feature is checked off and erased at the same time. Since once the strong feature is checked off and erased, there is no need for other elements to move to [Spec, DistP]. As a result, only one element that is read distributively when dou appears.