Interpreting 都 to 1 TO in earlier Southern Min texts

Abstract

The paper explores the polyfunctional word 都 to 1 TO in early Southern Min texts dating back to the sixteenth century or even earlier. Unlike 都 dou 1 in Mandarin, which mainly functions as a maximality operator, 都 to 1 in Southern Min is chiefly used as a modal particle expressing a concessive meaning or meaning of unexpectedness as a type of conventional implicature rather than pragmatic inference. However, it can be identified as expressing maximality and exhaustivity in construction with wh-words and negation. In a nutshell, the concessive sense is taken as the default sense unless it is overridden by the interpretation of 都 to 1 as a maximality operator. I will examine the syntactic and semantic properties of 都 to 1 based on these texts. Its interpretation hinges on the structural position it occupies and the collocates it interacts with.Keywords: Maximality; Concessivity; Default; Southern Min IntroductionAs attested in early Southern Min texts, a 都 to 1 TO is mainly subject to two interpretations: (1) a concessive interpretation and (2) an interpretation of maximality and exhaustivity. The two interpretations are structure-driven. The concessive meaning is obtained by the conflict between the at-issue meaning of the sentence marked by 都 to 1 and the presupposition or inferred meaning driven by the linguistic context. b The universal and distributive meaning induced by 都 to 1 is only compatible with the plural meaning carried by noun phrases. Since the construction featuring 都 to 1 is ambiguous between concessive and distributive meaning, we need some linguistic cues to disambiguate it. Let us assume that the concessive meaning is the default, unless the noun phrase constrained by 都 to 1 is a determiner phrases with a plural quantifier. In this particular situation, 都 to 1 would take on the distributive function and become a universal operator. The concessive meaning would be overridden if there was no linguistic cue to bring about a conflict between presuppositions of the word meaning and the atissue expression. Since 都 to 1 alone is potentially ambiguous between the concessive meaning and the interpretation of maximality and exhaustivity, my focus will be to pin down its exact meaning by examining the structural position it occupies in sentences. In addition to structural cues inside sentences, there is a need to draw on crosssentential elements for pinning down the interpretation of 都 to 1 . Our strategy is to first identify the sentence-internal elements that 都 to 1 co-occurs with. If there is a restrictor that 都 to 1 binds, then it takes on the function of a maximality operator