This paper explores the hypothesis of covert quantification – the idea that some nominals can be treated as having a (universal) quantifier covertly – by examining the interaction between the suffix -men and the particle dou within the Generalised Quantifier Theory framework (Barwise & Cooper, 1981; henceforth GQT). I begin by introducing the puzzle posed by -men in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Chinese), a suffix that has been widely analysed as a collective marker but demonstrates various features of a plural marker. I argue that neither analysis is satisfactory given the interaction of -men and dou, the latter of which can be analysed as the lexical representation of the Matching Function (Rothstein, 1995; henceforth the M-Function). Crucially, the collective analysis of -men fails to explain why it can co-occur with dou, which requires access to individual atoms, while the plural analysis of -men fails to predict many of its distributions and interpretations.
In light of these puzzles, I observe that when there is no overt universal quantifier in the sentence, nominals with -men turn out to be ambiguous between a strong and a weak reading, but they must receive a definite interpretation and have a “significant subpart” requirement, analogous to the semantic denotation of most of the X. This motivates the GQT treatment of - men which assumes covert quantification in its semantic representation. Moreover, the two readings of -men disambiguate in the presence of dou, with only the strong reading left, which further suggests the existence of a covert universal quantifier in -men, given that dou as the M-Function seeks a universal quantifier in the semantic composition (Pan, 2005; Zhang, 2007). To this end, I offer an alternative analysis in GQT terms that compares nominals with -men to most of the X, and further argue against the view that dou itself is a universal quantifier by addressing several persisting problems from previous accounts.