On verbal similative plurality of shenme de in Mandarin Chinese

In comparison to the extensive body of research on canonical expressions of homogeneous plurality, such as Mandarin bare nouns and the English plural morpheme -s, the study of similative plurality in natural language has received relatively little attention in the current literature (with notable exceptions such as Smith 2020aSmith, Ryan Walter. 2020a. Similative Plurals and the Nature of Alternatives. Doctoral dissertation, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ., 2020bSmith, Ryan Walter. 2020b. Similative plurality and the nature of alternatives. Semantics and Pragmatics 131:1–44. ). This study addresses this gap by contributing to a typological understanding of similative plurality through an analysis of the Mandarin expression shenme de, which conveys verbal similative plurality. Notably, in contrast to Japanese -tari, shenme de gives rise to two intriguing puzzles: it consistently yields an inclusive interpretation in both upward-entailing and downward-entailing contexts (the monotonicity puzzle) and resists overt contextual restriction (the domain restriction puzzle). Drawing on insights from Smith (2020aSmith, Ryan Walter. 2020a. Similative Plurals and the Nature of Alternatives. Doctoral dissertation, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ., 2020bSmith, Ryan Walter. 2020b. Similative plurality and the nature of alternatives. Semantics and Pragmatics 131:1–44. ), we propose a fully inclusive mixture analysis of shenme de and demonstrate how this framework accounts for both puzzles. Finally, based on empirical observations of shenme de, we propose three parameters to typologically characterize similative plurality in natural language: (a) the Category Parameter, (b) the Host Parameter, and (c) the Domain Argument Parameter.