Truth and Illusion:On the Essential Attributes of the Chinese Adverb DOU
Based on a close examination of the occurrences of the Chinese adverb"dou"in different circumstances,it is argued in this paper that:(1)it inherently possesses the essential attributes of'domain adverb'as delimited in traditional grammar,whose fundamental function is to map a fuzzy set consisting of more than one member;its existing analyses,namely universal quantification,distribution,sum,relative large quantity,maximality or exhaustivity respectively,are random in nature in the sense that they are heavily reliant on certain particular contexts;(2)unlike the true universal quantifiers"all"and"every",the hard fact that its semantics varies under different contexts indicates that the domain adverb can be treated as an underspecified operator capable of facilitating semantic interpretation by confirming the quantity in specific contexts,and in the meantime capable of intensifying the illocutionary force of the relevant sentence.The analysis of"dou"as a domain adverb,therefore,can provide a unifying account of the syntactic,semantic as well as pragmatic information injected by its use.
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