On October 30, Professor Yimei Xiang gave an invited talk at the Linguistics Speaker Series at the University of Pennsylvania. Her talk was titled “From ‘also’ to ‘even’: Function alternations of the Mandarin particle ye,” and the abstract is copied below.
Abstract:
The Mandarin particle ye exhibits both a simple additive use (‘also’) and a scalar additive use (‘even’). This alternation is unlikely to be accidental: across genetically and typologically diverse languages, additive markers frequently extend to scalar interpretations. Why does additivity so often give rise to scalarity, rather than to some other meaning component? Mandarin offers a particularly revealing testing ground for this question, as the ‘even’ use of ye overlaps with that of another multifunctional particle, dou, which displays a distributor–‘even’ alternation.
I argue that the presuppositional properties of ye, including focus-sensitivity, additivity, and scalarity, derive from a single definedness condition, termed ‘Identity to Anti-Exclusion’. Parallel to the distributor-to-‘even’ alternation of dou, the ‘also’-to-‘even’ alternation of ye arises when exclusivity is defined in terms of likelihood rather than logical strength.
This account clarifies both the parallels and the contrasts between ye and dou across several scalar environments, such as minimizer-licensing constructions and evaluative statements. I argue that the distribution of these two particles in these constructions is shaped by their shared scalarity and their difference in additivity.