Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Pluractionality: A cross-linguistic perspective (Mattiola)
This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/PyrolatrousCoagulate and presents a cross-linguistic perspective of pluractionality. Mattiola defines pluractionality as being a "morphological modification of the verb or a pair of semantically related verbs that primarily convey a plurality of situations involving a repetition in time, space, and/or participants (Mattiola, 2019, p. 164)." Moreover, the paper distinguishes pluractionality as a subtype of verbal number; the latter may be encoded through any linguistic means (e.g., adverbs), whereas pluractionality refers to the encoding of these semantics by direct morphological modification on the verb. An alternative definition can be found on Wikipedia: "[it] is a grammatical device that indicates that the action or participants of a verb is/are plural." Now onto the prompts:
- Are verbs marked for pluractionality in your language?
- If not, what are other means to express verbal number?
- What other functions do these markers encode — besides pluractionality? (e.g., habituality, continuativity)
- How do pluractional markers behave morphosyntactically?
- Are there any interesting interactions between pluractional markers and other morphemes?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!