Syntactic compositionality of property concept (PC)-expressions in Telangana Telugu

Abstract This paper explores the syntactic composition of Property Concept (PC)-expressions in Telangana Telugu. The study reveals two distinct ways in which PC-roots are composed into PC-adjectives and PC-nouns in syntax. These are: (1) PC-roots directly merge with an a-cat to form PC-adjectives and (2) PC-roots base-merge with an n-cat to form PC nouns, which necessitate more complex compositional structures such as relativization and case marking for their appearance in modification structures. 57 PC-expressions are selected from TT and four syntactic tests are employed to ascertain the syntactic category of each expression. It was found that 12 PC-roots exhibit adjectival properties and are categorized as PC-adjectives, being merged directly in the attributive modification position as adjectives. The remaining 45 PC-roots exhibit nominal properties, leading to their categorization as PC-nouns. The syntactic composition of these PC-nouns involves additional mechanisms like relativization. Some PCs use the CoS copula avu ‘become’ while others use a ∅ equative copula, resulting in variations in sub-eventual semantics.