ABSTRACT
After reviewing critics of the non-veridicality approach of the polarity items, this chapter talks more about the traditional downward-entailing approach and how this approach is fit and non-fit to Chinese dou sentences. We give the different mapping mechanism of dou’s tripartite structures and argue that polarity items can be licensed in the downward-entailing position of dou’s quantificational domain. This is fit for both left-quantification of dou and background quantification of dou. This chapter shows that Chinese negative polarity item na-CL is licensed exclusively in downward-entailing contexts and this will be further shown that this licensing condition can be formalized as a restriction to a necessity-denoting tripartite structure in Mandarin Chinese.
