Dou and homogeneity removal - A new perspective to the co-occurrence puzzle

Plural definites are known to exhibit homogeneity and non-maximality effect. The two phenomena are reported to appear and disappear together; universal quantifiers (UQs) like every/all can remove both (Križ 015). The nature of Mandarin UQs has long been contested since they canonically co-occur with dou, which also seems to also exert UQ force. In this paper, I will present novel data that dou has the true UQ power due to its ability to remove homogeneity. Building on the view that homogeneity results from pluralization (since Schwarzschild 1993), I treat dou as a universal pluralization operator ∀-PL (Bar-Lev 2021); homogeneity removal is thus a by-product of agreement between UQ and ∀-PL.