This paper will appear in Nakayama, M. & Su, Y.-C. (Eds.), Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In Honor of Stephen Crain. John Benjamins. 1 Free choice and wh-indefinites in child Mandarin Peng Zhou Macquarie University The present study reports findings from experimental studies investigating Mandarin-speaking children’s knowledge of the free choice reading of existential expressions like wh-indefinites. Twenty-eight monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and twenty-two Mandarin-speaking adults participated in the study. Using a Question-Statement task (Zhou & Crain, 2011), the present study found that four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children exhibited adult-like knowledge of the free choice reading of existential expressions. The current findings, in conjunction with the findings of previous research, provide evidence for a unified account of the semantic interpretations of existential expressions. 1. Introduction The present study reports findings from experimental studies of child language that provide evidence for a linguistic universal that applies both within and across human languages (Chomsky 1965). Empirical support for the universal comes from experiments looking at children’s acquisition of the dual semantic interpretations of existential expressions in both English and in Mandarin Chinese, which we discuss below. Across languages, existential expressions such as Mandarin renhe and English any, and words for disjunction like Mandarin huozhe and English or have a similar semantic interpretation when they appear in the scope of downward entailing expressions (e.g., the negative quantificational expression meiyouren ‘nobody’). Consider examples (1) and (2). In (1), the disjunction word huozhe ‘or’ occurs in the scope of the negative expression meiyouren ‘nobody’, thereby yielding a conjunctive entailment that nobody ate apples and nobody ate bananas. In (2), the negative polarity item (NPI) renhe ‘any’ appears in the scope of meiyouren ‘nobody’, thus the sentence generates an extended conjunctive entailment that nobody ate apples, nobody ate bananas, nobody ate oranges, and so on. (1) Mei-you-ren chi pingguo huozhe xiangjiao. not-have-person eat apple or banana ‘Nobody ate apples or bananas.’ (2) Mei-you-ren chi renhe shuiguo. not-have-person eat any fruit ‘Nobody ate any fruit.’ Across languages, these same existential expressions assume another semantic guise, as Free Choice Items (FCIs) in certain linguistic contexts. For example, both the disjunction words (Mandarin huozhe, English or) and the NPIs (Mandarin renhe, English any) license free choice inferences when they appear in the scope of a deontic modal, such as Mandarin keyi and English may (Dayal 1995, Geurts 2005, Kamp 1973, Zhou, Romoli & Crain 2013, Zimmermann 2000). This is illustrated in examples (3) and (4). In (3), the disjunction word huozhe ‘or’ appear in the scope of the deontic modal keyi ‘may’, thereby generating the free choice inference that Kung Fu Panda is free to choose which fruit to eat; Kung Fu Panda may choose apples and he may choose bananas. In (4), renhe ‘any’ is also licensed as a FCI by the deontic modal keyi ‘may’, thus generating the same free choice inference that Kung Fu Panda is free to choose which fruit to eat.