Which NP does all associate with in e.g. “The pandas, the children all saw”—
the pandas, the children, or both? The intuition of adult Mandarin Chinese native speakers
regarding the interpretation of the adverbial quantifier dou ‘all’ remains unclear and con-
troversial, and various incommensurate theories of domain selection have been proposed.
These studies may have failed to yield clear results because they used testing materials in
which the interpretation of dou is confounded with other principles of NP interpretation (e.g.
zhexie xiaohai ‘these children’ is truth-functionally synonymous with ‘all these children’).
To address these concerns, we present the first set of experimental studies on adult knowl-
edge and use of syntactic constraints on the quantifier domain of dou. The results support the
hypothesis that dou can take one and only one c-commanding NP as its domain, but falsify
interesting theoretical accounts that assume a strict locality constraint on dou quantification.

EB00000003950K

Available

• The Quantificational Domain of dou: An Experimental Study