On the Quantification of Events in Dou Construction

Abstract

In the existing literature, the three aspects of the quantificational adverb dou a—the objects of quantification, the properties of quantification and the means by which dou a quantifies—are still controversial issues. Therefore in this paper we first try to define quantify and construct a quantification system. This quantification system consists of three primary elements including quantified scope, quantifying unit, quantity value, as well as two basic quantifying ways including cumulative sum (forward quantification) and distributive division (reverse quantification), in addition to four main results including singular, plural, total quantity and partial quantity. On this basis, we define the quantified object of dou a as the eventualities expressed by the given sentence; we also redefine dou a’s properties of quantification as distributive universality. Then we divide the quantification construction of dou a into four parts: distributive domain, distributive index, distributive operator and distributive share. Through investigating the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of these four parts, as well as the distributive dependency relations between these four parts, we explained how dou a quantifies eventualities.