Gould, Isaac. 2018. Telugu maatram: A Morpheme that Agrees with an only-Operator. Studies in Generative Grammar, 28-3, 365-388. This paper provides an initial description of Telugu (Dravidian) maatram, a morpheme that indicates the semantics of an exhaustivity operator (akin to English only), which I call an only-Operator. The distribution of maatram has an interesting property: a VP-internal maatram appears to require the associate of this operator to be the entire VP. Accounting for this poses a challenge to a straightforward mapping between the form maatram and the meaning of the operator. In response to this challenge, I propose dissociating the semantic force of exhaustification from the morpheme maatram. Thus I propose that there are phonologically null semantic only-Operators, and that maatram is an overt morpho-syntactic marker that instead plays a role in indicating the associate of these operators. Crucially, an operator and maatram are involved in a relation of syntactic agreement, and the locality of this relation allows us to account for the distribution of maatram and the associate of the operator.
1. Introduction
2. The core data
3. Rejecting maatram as an only-Op
4. A dissociation approach to maatram
5. Conclusion
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