Mandarin dou: The common core of distributivity, maximality, and EVEN

Abstract

The paper presents a unified analysis of Mandarin dou as an alternative sensitive (sentential) operator whose semantics equals to Karttunen and Peters (1979)’s EVEN. Different ‘uses’ of dou are analyzed by associating dou with different types of alternative sets: even-dou involves non-entailment-based alternative sets, while distributive-dou entailment-based ones.