How to reconcile maximal and non-maximal ‘every’.
Published in Sinn und Bedeutung 29, 2025
Traditionally translated as ‘each’, Mandarin mei has been regarded as a strong candidate for universal quantifiers due to its purported ability to express maximality and distributivity. But mei’s status has been debated as it canonically co-occurs with dou, which also appears to enforce maximality like all. This paper presents novel data showing that dou, rather than mei, is responsible for expressing maximality. The existence of distributive items like mei, which enforce distributivity but do not require maximality, underscores the need to distinguish maximality from distributivity as a separate semantic property, as recently argued by Haslinger et al. (2025).