On mei ‘every ’ and dou ‘all ’ in Mandarin Chinese*

This paper concentrates on the syntactic and semantic behaviours of mei ‘every ’ and dou ‘all ’ in Mandarin Chinese, in which preverbal mei must co-occur with dou. I argue that dou is adjunct to either I or Pr in Tang’s (1990, 2001) non-specifier analysis on Chinese adverbials. The choice (between I or Pr) is made to make a shortest dou chain, which explains dou’s distribution with PPs and light verb constructions. On their semantic interaction, mei sets the distributive unit for the distributive operator dou and preverbal mei-phrases have to be quantified by dou to be interpreted discourse-anaphoric