Contrastive study of nominal universal quantification in Spanish and Chinese

The concept of universal quantification has been a subject of significant interest in both formal logic and linguistics, with ongoing research dating back to the emergence of generative grammar (Chomsky, 1957; May, 1977). In Spanish, there are three key universal quantifiers: todo/a(s), cada, and ambo/as, which have been explored from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives (Sánchez López, 1999; López Palma, 1999; Camus Bergareche, 2006). However, the definition of universal quantifiers in Chinese remains a topic of debate. Some scholars argue that the adverb 都dōu is responsible of universal quantification, (Huang, 1982; Feng and Pan, 2018), thus questioning the existence of nominal quantifiers in Chinese. 

This paper first examines the various theoretic approaches of the frequently used term 都dōu and presents our stance on its classification. Based on the analysis of data from the BCC corpus and experimental data collected from native speakers (truth-value and ambiguos judgment tasks and prosodic experiments), we argue that 都 is not a true universal quantifier but rather a focus adverb whose meaning is heavily dependent on prosody and often influenced by contextual factors (Li, 2023; Liu, 2023). Additionally, we highlight the phenomenon of null universal quantifiers in Chinese, where a bare noun can imply the total quantity, often necessitating the presence of 都dōu. This observation contributes to the misconception that 都 dōu functions as a universal quantifier. Next, within the framework of generative grammar (Heim and Kratzer, 1998; Hornstein, 2009; Szabolcsi, 2010) and the theory of semantic types (Montague, 1974; Gamut, 1991), we conduct a contrastive analysis of the three universal quantifiers in Spanish and their Mandarin counterparts. This comparison is approached from both syntactic and semantic perspectives, drawing on data from the literature (Peng and Yan, 2007; Cheng, 2009; Zhou, 2011; Liu, 2023), as well as from two corpora: the Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI (CORPES) for Spanish and the BLCU Corpus Center (BCC) for Chinese, in addition to introspective examples.

This study employs a mixed-methods analytical approach, prioritizing qualitative analysis to systematically describe nominal universal quantification patterns in both languages, while complementing it with quantitative corpus-based frequency analyses where applicable. By leveraging empirical data, the research seeks to deliver a fine-grained comparative account of universal quantifier usage, elucidating both cross-linguistic parallels and divergences. Our twofold objective is: 1. To establish a typologically grounded framework for systematic comparison, deriving descriptive generalizations from a robust empirical dataset; 2. To develop contrastive analytical proposals that align with the structural and typological distinctions between Spanish (an inflectional Indo-European language) and Chinese (an analytic Sino-Tibetan language). Our findings demonstrate that Mandarin Chinese does have universal quantifiers corresponding to todo/a(s) and cada in Spanish, such as 每 měi, 所有 suoyou, 全 quán, 整 zhěng, and 一切 yíqiè. However, these terms display more complex syntactic and semantic properties, as they include classifiers but lack plural markers. Our theoretical advancement lies in dividing Chinese universal quantifiers into two categories, Type I and Type II, based on whether they can be combined with classifiers and comparing them with universal quantifiers in Spanish.