Introduction

Manipuri or Meiteilon, the language of the Meiteis, is spoken in Manipur, a state situated in North East India. According to Grierson (1904), it is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Kuki-Chin sub-family. However, according to the classification made by Burling (2003), Manipuri is best treated as a separate entity rather than as a subfamily of the Naga-Kuki group. It is the official language of the state alongside English. As Manipur is also the home of many other hill tribes namely, Nagas and Kukis, Meiteilon serves as a lingua franca among the speakers of 29 dialects of the state.

Prior to the explanation of universal quantifiers in Manipuri, we look at the difference between distributivity and collectivity. There are two accounts of plural denotation, they are distibutivity and collectivity. Distributivity indicates reference to each individual member of a set (Mathews, 1997). We can say that a term A (plural term) is distributive only if A is true of some things and if it is true of each of them separately. If we say a term A denotes several things, it is equivalent to saying that it denotes each of them separately. We can say that an expression has collectivity denotation when the plural term A denotes several things jointly without denoting any of them separately. Term A is collective if it is not distributive.