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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Ways of Pluralizing Events Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zj310p2 Author Henderson, Robert Martin Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ WAYS OF PLURALIZING EVENTS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LINGUISTICS by Robert Henderson September 2012 The Dissertation of Robert Henderson is approved: Professor Adrian Brasoveanu, Chair Professor Donka Farkas, Chair Professor Judith Aissen Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright c by Robert Henderson 2012 Table of Contents List of Figures vi Abstract vii Dedicationx Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction1 1.1 Outline of the dissertation............................ 13 1.2 Methodological note............................... 17 1.3 A Quick Introduction to Kaqchikel....................... 24 1.3.1 Alignment and basic order........................ 27 1.3.2 Derivation and verb classes........................ 30 I Plural Events 35 2 Event-internal vs Event-external Pluractionality 36 2.1 Formal foundations................................ 41 2.1.1 Ontology................................. 41 2.1.2 Cumulative Closure........................... 42 2.1.3 Thematic roles and spatiotemporal traces................ 44 2.2 Typological preliminaries: event-internal vs event-external pluractionals.... 47 2.3 Previous approaches to the internal/external split................ 53 2.3.1 Cusic 1981: Origins of the internal/external split............ 54 2.3.2 Lasersohn 1995: The first formal account................ 55 2.3.3 Wood 2007: A group-based account................... 57 2.3.4 Tovena and Kihm 2008: Group-based pluractionality in Romance................................ 59 2.3.5 van Geenhoven 2004: Pluractionality and atelicity........... 60 2.3.6 Summary of the previous approaches.................. 63 iii 3 Event-external Pluralization 66 3.1 The morphosyntax of –löj ............................ 68 3.2 Aspect and the interpretation of –löj ....................... 71 3.2.1 Aspectual insensitivity.......................... 71 3.2.2 Non-contiguous repetition........................ 73 3.2.3 Habitual readings............................. 76 3.3 Distributive and dependent pluractionality................... 78 3.3.1 The interaction of predicative distributivity and –löj .......... 80 3.3.2 The interaction of distributive quantification and –löj ......... 82 3.4 Summary..................................... 85 3.5 –löj and non-atomic event reference....................... 86 3.5.1 Accounting for aspectual insensitivity and entailment......... 89 3.5.2 Deriving vague plural cardinality.................... 96 3.5.3 Accounting for habitual readings and variable downtime........ 104 3.5.4 τ-based pluractionality as a source of atelicity.............. 108 3.5.5 Accounting for distributive readings................... 114 3.6 Conclusions.................................... 123 4 Event-internal Pluralization 125 4.1 Morphosyntax of –Ca’ .............................. 128 4.2 Aspectual selection for semelfactives....................... 131 4.3 Contiguous repetition on a single occasion................... 138 4.4 Opaqueness to distributivity........................... 139 4.5 Summary..................................... 141 4.6 A group-based analysis of –Ca’ .......................... 142 4.6.1 Accounting for distributivity and cumulativity............. 144 4.6.2 Accounting for aspectual selection and restricted entailments..... 151 4.6.3 Atelicity: A loose end.......................... 157 4.7 Spatiotemporally-defined group nouns...................... 158 4.7.1 Background on groups.......................... 159 4.7.2 Grove-type groups............................ 163 4.7.3 Grove-type groups and event-internal pluractionality.......... 170 4.8 Conclusions.................................... 176 II Plural Events and Quantification 179 5 A First Pass at Pluractional Distributivity 180 5.1 Introduction.................................... 180 5.2 Pluractional distributivity and its interpretation................ 186 5.3 A θ-role based account of –la’ .......................... 196 5.4 Interim conclusions................................ 201 iv 6 Dependent Indefinites: Licensed by evaluation pluractionality 203 6.1 Previous approaches and the typology of dependent indefinites............................... 207 6.1.1 Strong licensing: Russian nibud’-indefinites............... 207 6.1.2 Weak licensing: Telugu reduplicated-indefinites............. 210 6.1.3 The middle case: Romanian/Hungarian dependent indefinites..... 212 6.2 Dependent indefinites and distributive pluractionality are evaluation plural.. 222 6.2.1 Formal preliminaries........................... 224 6.2.2 Dependent indefinites.......................... 227 6.2.3 Distributive pluractionality....................... 232 6.2.4 Summary discussion........................... 243 6.3 Conclusions.................................... 247 6.4 Going compositional............................... 249 III Plural Events and Degrees 253 7 English Pluractional Adverbials 254 7.1 Introduction.................................... 254 7.2 Basic data and previous approaches........................ 257 7.2.1 NUM-BY-NUM .............................. 257 7.2.2 N-BY-N.................................. 265 7.2.3 Recasting incrementality......................... 268 7.3 Scales and X-BY-X adverbials........................... 272 7.4 An analysis in increments............................ 278 7.4.1 Extending the account to NUM-BY-NUM ................ 287 7.5 Conclusion.................................... 289 8 Conclusions and Future Research 291 v List of Figures 1.1 Children eating three tortillas each........................ 22 1.2 Children eating three tortillas total........................ 23 1.3 K’ichean-branch Mayan languages (after Kaufman 1974; Richards 2003).... 25 1.4 Kaqchikel-speaking region following Icke 2007 (Lago Atitlán in blue)...... 26 1.5 Standard Mayan orthography.......................... 27 1.6 Ergative or Set A: [before C] / [before V].................... 28 1.7 Absolutive or Set B: [before C] / [before V]................... 28 1.8 Glossing conventions............................... 34 3.1 –löj as a temporal modifier............................ 88 3.2 –b’iyinilöj ..................................... 90 3.3 –löj blocks atomic events............................. 94 3.4 Contiguous plural events............................. 105 3.5 Non-contiguous plural events.......................... 105 3.6 Collective reading of Xeb’ixanilöj; cf. 209 .................... 117 4.1 An example of a –Ca’ event............................ 143 4.2 Xikitz’etetz’a’; cf. 278 ............................... 147 4.3 Xurochora’; cf. 288 ................................ 153 4.4 Minimize endstates................................ 155 4.5 Atoms, Groups, and Pluralities.......................... 162 6.1 Typology of indefinite plurality......................... 247 vi Abstract Ways of Pluralizing Events by Robert Henderson The central claim of this dissertation is that there is more variation than previously recog- nized in the types of plural events that verbal predicates can denote. To make this argument the dissertation presents a detailed description and analysis of a series of pluractional suf- fixes in the Mayan language Kaqchikel that derive verbal predicates that cannot be satisfied in single-event scenarios. The guiding theoretical question is to determine the relationship be- tween pluractionality and better understood semantic phenomena such as nominal plurality and quantification. Based on original fieldwork on Kaqchikel, I argue for a broad three- way distinction between pluractional affixes, where: (i) the first class generates pluractional predicates with denotations similar to a formally distinct subclass of group nouns like grove, bouquet, horde, etc., (ii) the second class generates pluractional predicates similar to bare plu- rals, and (iii) the third class generates pluralities similar to those that are introduced when interpreting a quantifier like every. I further argue for a morphosyntactic spilt between the first type of pluractional affix and the latter two. The former composes with verb roots di- rectly before they undergo cumulative closure, while the latter two apply to verb stems that have been cumulatively closed. While pluractional verbs have types of plural reference familiar from the nominal domain, verbs in general establish plural reference in different ways than nouns, which follows from the fact that events, unlike individuals, are individuated in terms of their participants and spa- vii tiotemporal location. I argue that to individuate the events that constitute an event plurality, pluractionals structure the way that a spatiotemporal trace function or theta-role function maps an event to its domain. In the case of the first two pluractional affixes, the temporal trace is crucial. In the last case, the pluractional targets a verb’s thematic role. By structuring the relations between events and functionally related domains, the Kaqchikel pluractionals are semantically similar to Krifka’s (1986,1992) incremental theme role or certain distribu- tive adverbial modifiers in languages like English and Japanese (Brasoveanu & Henderson 2009 and Nakanishi 2007, respectively). By separating