Types of pluractionalty and plurality across domains in ʔayʔaǰuθəm
Citation: Mellesmoen, G, & Huijsmans, M. (2019). Types of pluractionalty and plurality across domains in ʔayʔaǰuθəm. Proceedings of the 29th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, eds. K. Blake, F. Davis, K. Lamp, & J. Rhyne: 103–116.
Abstract: In this paper, we examine two markers of verbal plurality, C1C2 reduplication and ablaut, in ʔayʔaǰuθəm, a Central Salish language. C1C2 reduplication marks event external pluractionality, where subevents are distributed in both space and time. It also applies in the nominal domain creating a plurality of individuals, but does not impose temporal or spatial distribution in the nominal domain. Following Henderson (2012, 2017), we propose that events are individuated through their temporal and spatial traces, so that events distribute in order to pluralize, whereas this is not required in the nominal domain. Ablaut marks event-internal pluractionality where subevents are grouped into a larger whole (Wood 2007; Henderson 2012, 2017). While ablaut pluractionals typically involve numerous subevents that are closely spaced in time, they can involve as few as two subevents and do not require strict adjacency of all subevents. We propose that they denote an atomic group event that is mapped to a plurality of events via a membership function (Barker 1992). This contrasts with event-internal pluractionals that require a high number of temporally adjacent subevents and have been analyzed as being grouped through their temporal configuration (Henderson 2012, 2017), indicating that there is more than one way to group events, just as there is more than one way to group individuals in the nominal domain (Barker 1992; Henderson 2012, 2017).