Pluractionality: A cross‐linguistic perspective

Abstract

This paper aims to give a cross‐linguistic overview of pluractionality. Pluractionality is defined as a structural modification of the verb indicating the presence of multiple events. The paper first investigates the functions associated with pluractional markers in the languages of the world and classifies them into core and additional functions. I then present the most frequent marking strategies that the languages adopt in order to encode pluractionality and briefly discuss the morphological nature of one in particular (i.e., lexical alternation), as well as the formal identification of participant plurality. Finally, I examine the grammatical status of pluractionality in a cross‐linguistic perspective, taking the most recent typological literature into consideration. I conclude that “pluractionality” cannot be theoretically conceived as a unique, cross‐linguistically valid category but should rather be regarded as a label, which indicates different phenomena in different languages, useful for typological comparison but not reflecting any kind of pre‐established grammatical category.

Pluractionality of Events in Macuxi: A Morpho-Syntactic and Semantic Analysis

“…Analogous to number in the nominal domain, distinguishing singularity and plurality, scholars have termed this as verbal number (Corbett 2000), event plurality, iterativity (Xrakovskij 1997), verbal plurality (Cusic 1981), or pluractionality (Newman 1980(Newman , 1990, which is the term we adopt in this paper. According to Lasersohn (1995), Mattiola (2019Mattiola ( , 2020 and Wood (2007), pluractionality involves grammatical markers of Languages 2023, 8, 225 2 of 16 event plurality associated with the verb, and these markers express the repetition of events in time or space, or across various participants.…”

Aspectual marking from a typologically uncommon origin: a quantitative account of the development of hamē(w) in Middle Persian

“…Figure 3) appear to give rise to a progressive reading (9.9% of the whole data in Table 5), which is no longer pluractional in the strict sense, but has been argued to develop out of pluractional context (Mattiola 2019: 34). In such cases the unbounded nature of hamē is compatible with, or provides, the required opportunity for the event to be "extended over time" (Mattiola 2020: 17 Appreciating an anonymous reviewer's comment, we can add that this can be either as 'sheer continuation' or 'continued effort to keep the action ongoing'. It seems that the choice depends on the amount of agentivity attributed to the verb's subject.…”