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Article published In:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 19:1 (2018) ► pp.156–195

The scope of even

Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

| National Sun Yat-sen University

One of the issues in the study of even is concerned with the ambiguous scope interpretations contributed by the focus adverb even. There have been two main camps: the lexical approach and the scope approach. Unlike English, which does not have distinct lexical items for even, Mandarin Chinese (Chinese hereafter) utilizes two constructions to express the notion of even: (1) The lian … dou ‘including … all’ construction, and (2) focus adverbs, such as shenzhi. This paper aims to demonstrate that the lian … dou construction expresses the typical implicatures in even sentences predicted by the scope theory. The seemingly deviant cases that have been argued for a lexical NPI even by Rooth, however, either are not construed in lian … dou sentences or are possibly rendered in shenzhi sentences provided by the pragmatic accommodation of existential presuppositions. In particular, dou syntactically marks focus scope and quantifies over a focus domain consisting of the focused phrase and its alternatives in presupposition. The results of this study thus shed further light on the general discussion of even in the sense that: on the one hand, the scope theory can make the right predictions, as evidenced by lian … dou; and, on the other hand, pragmatic scalar inference of the existential implicatures should be taken into consideration. Ultimately the expression of even manifests interfaces of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Keywords: even , scope theory, lexical theory, negative polarity item, scalar implicature, presupposition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ambiguity in even sentences
    • 2.1The lexical theory
    • 2.2The scope theory reinvented
  • 3.Chinese lian … dou and shenzhi
  • 4.The syntactic scope of lian … dou
    • 4.1Scope marking of dou
    • 4.2 Lian … dou in downward entailing context
    • 4.3 Even-DP in non-finite complement clause
  • 5.A discussion of existential presupposition
    • 5.1 Even- VP fixed scope?
    • 5.2Lian … dou vs. shenzhi
      • 5.2.1Quantifier scope
    • 5.3A residual issue on even in non-finite complement clause
    • 5.4Focus range of shenzhi
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 5 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00006.shy
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