Interpreting 都 to TO in earlier Southern Min texts

The paper explores the polyfunctional word 都 to TO in early Southern Min texts dating back to the sixteenth century or even earlier. Unlike 都 dou in Mandarin, which mainly functions as a maximality operator, 都 to in Southern Min is chiefly used as a modal particle expressing a concessive meaning or meaning of unexpectedness as a type of conventional implicature rather than pragmatic inference. However, it can be identified as expressing maximality and exhaustivity in construction with wh-words and negation. In a nutshell, the concessive sense is taken as the default sense unless it is overridden by the interpretation of 都 to as a maximality operator. I will examine the syntactic and semantic properties of 都 to based on these texts. Its interpretation hinges on the structural position it occupies and the collocates it interacts with.