A pragmatic explanation of the - co-occurrence in Mandarin.

Mandarin universal terms such as -NPs in preverbal positions usually require the presence of 'all/even'. This motivates the widely accepted idea from Lin (Nat Lang Semant 6:201-243, 1998) that Mandarin does not have genuine distributive universal quantifiers, and -NPs are disguised plural definites, which thus need -a distributive operator (or an adverbial universal quantifier in Lee (Studies on Quantification in Chinese. Ph. D. thesis, UCLA), Pan (in: Yufa Yanjiu Yu Tansuo [Grammatical Study and Research], vol 13, pp 163-184. The Commercial Press)-to form a universal statement. This paper defends the opposite view that -NPs are true universal quantifiers while is not. is truth-conditionally vacuous but carries a presupposition that its prejacent is the strongest among its alternatives (Liu in Linguist Philos 40(1):61-95, 2017b). The extra presupposition triggers Maximize Presupposition (Heim in: Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenssischen Forschung, pp 487-535. de Gruyter, Berlin, 1991), which requires [ ] block [] whenever 's presupposition is satisfied. This explains the - co-occurrence, if -NPs are universal quantifiers normally triggering individual alternatives (thus stronger than all the other alternatives). The proposal predicts a more nuanced distribution of obligatory-, not limited to universals and sensitive to discourse contexts.