Quantification in Telugu

Abstract

After presenting some basic genetic, historical, and typological information about Telugu, this chapter outlines its quantification patterns. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers: generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite, and partitive, which are all defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in Chapter 1. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial-type quantifiers and Nominal- (or Determiner-) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers, it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. In summary, the chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Telugu, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.