Dou's Association with Event and Its Unified Semantic Account

The orientation and object of the Chinese morpheme dou's semantic association have been the topic of much discussion in the literature. Based on the data concerning dou's right dislocation, it is argued that (i) the orientation of dou's semantic association, which is usually the event or events manifested in the relevant utterance, serves as the premise for a unified semantic account of dou-sentences; (ii) the parsing of dou's dislocation could also demonstrate that dou is inherently an intensifier, whose function is to highlight a variable relating to an event or events; (iii) and eventually a semantic account model is proposed within the framework of event semantics, in which dou is associated with event while the restrictor part could be a constituent from the structure or from the particular context. In other words, what dou intensifies could be a single event or events.