Quantifiers in Malayalam: a tribute to Dany and Operators in the Lexicon Karen De Clercq Ghent University/FWO 1 Introduction With this short paper I want to pay tribute to Dany and his extremely inspiring dissertation Operators in the lexicon (henceforth OiL). In my own dissertation I did not refer to his work explicitly but the impact his work had on my thinking cannot be underestimated. In 2011, I started exploring the idea that Dany’s OiL is actually morphologically reflected in how quantifiers are built in Malayalam, a Dravidian language spoken in India. Moreover, I realized how Jaspers’ decom- position of the lexicon in terms of operators meshes well with a nanosyntactic approach, a framework that I learned about in the course of that same year. At the time, I wrote a 2-page abstract on this, but never submitted it to any confer- ence, because I considered the ideas immature. The present paper takes a stab at developing these ideas from years ago a bit further and most importantly, wants to show that the abstract formal operators presented in Jaspers (2005) are a morphological reality in some languages spoken on this planet and are hence presumably to be taken seriously when we think about the structure of the func- tional sequence. 2 Jaspers (2005): Operators in the lexicon Jaspers (2005) sets out to explain why *ēĆēĉ and *ēĆđđ are cross-linguistically not lexicalisable. Instead of the pragmatic Gricean approach to the *ēĆđđ prob- lem developed by Horn (1989), Jaspers explores the lexical gap from a mentalist perspective and treats the problem as hard-wired in our cognition, as such shap- ing the structure and form of the lexicon. Jaspers argues extensively that the 1