PLAN DE GESTIÓN DE COSTES

Until now, I have mainly discussed how pluractionality relates to other phenomena and how it can be characterized or delimited. The attention will now be shifted to

distinctions that have been made within pluractionality. The first distinction to be discussed is the distinction between event number and participant number, which was introduced by Corbett (2000). The second distinction, also commonly accepted in the literature, is the distinction between event-external and event-internal pluractionality, originating in Cusic (1981).

1.6.1. Event number vs. participant number

Corbett (2000), makes a distinction between event and participant number. He uses the term ‘event number’ to refer to ‘multiple’ events, which basically means repeated events.117 _{The term ‘participant number’, by contrast, refers to cases of verbs that require}

multiple participants. Corbett compares these cases to what he calls classificatory verbs.118 _{Classificatory verbs are verbs that are semantically compatible with a restricted}

set of nouns. For instance, a given verb may combine only with nouns referring to round/ flat/ live objects as illustrated in (59). Classificatory verbs can be found e.g. in Amerindian languages.119 _{Verbs that are marked for participant number are similar in the}

sense that they are compatible only with certain nouns: nouns referring to plural objects. Thus, the verb form in (59d) combines with plural objects, “whether live or not, round or flat” (Corbett 2000:248).

(59) a. lv_{oy [Klamath]}120

‘to give a round object’ b. ne_oy

‘to give a flat object’ c. ksvoy

‘to give a live object’ d. sɁewanɁ

‘to give plural objects’

117 _{It also covers cases that Corbett describes as ‘continuous repetitive action’, an example of which would be}

patter, or ‘durative iteration’, represented by gnaw.

118 _{This is an idea found already in Boas (1911b:381); cf. Durie (1986).}

119 _{Cf. also Mithun (1999:84-5): “A large number of North American languages show lexical distinctions of}

number. The Koasati verb roots contain number specification as part of their basic meanings. The Koasati verb

walí:na, for example, is used for a single person or animal running alone, while the verb tółkan is used for a group running together. The two verbs denote what are categorized as different kinds of events. (A few English verbs also imply a plurality of participants, such as stampede or scatter, though the lexicon has not developed

in the same systematic way.) The verbs that show such alternations tend to represent situations in which the number of participants is viewed as significantly affecting the nature of the action or state [...]”. Mithun (1988:214) also points out that these pairs of verbs are not related by ‘suppletion’, which is the term sometimes found in the literature. Suppletion is an allomorphic alternation, but these verbs are not related inflectionally. Rather, she uses the term ‘stem alternation’ (and in Mithun 1999 ‘verb alternation’) and takes it to be a relation between two separate lexical items.

Corbett notes that some languages have both types of verbal number and may use the same formal device for both. In spite of that, he considers event number and participant number two distinct types of verbal number. Below I will argue, however, that it is probably more adequate to treat cases like (59d) as a phenomenon distinct from pluractionality. Once these cases are excluded from pluractionality, there might be little evidence for making a fundamental distinction between event and participant number. Wood (2007) calls verbs comparable to the one in (59d) ‘argument-numbered’ or ‘plural-argument’ verbs. These are verbs that take plural arguments and have singular argument counterparts, which usually have a different stem:

(60) a. mok’vdeba daixocebian [Georgian]121

‘someone dies’ ‘they die’

b. chyuuk’wen rek’iin [Yurok]122

‘to sit’ ‘to sit (pl.)’

As Wood points out, these (pairs of) verbs represent a limited set in any language. They are often e.g. verbs of motion or posture. In Wood’s view, these verbs are potentially related to pluractionals but distinct from true grammatical pluractionality. This is a view that I adopt here as well. As a consequence, I conclude, together with Wood (2007), that the category of participant number, as discussed by Corbett, might in fact comprise two rather different types of verbs. One type would be ‘plural-argument’ verbs of the type illustrated in (60). These are indeed comparable to classificatory verbs, as suggested by Corbett (2000) and others before. These verbs are quite different from regular pluractional verbs by not being derived by productive morphological markers. It is even possible to compare plural-argument verbs to pairs like the English kill vs. massacre,

where the two forms are morphologically unrelated. The other type would be pluractional verbs derived (more or less) productively and regularly which refer to events involving plural participants. I suggest that this latter type does not need to be distinguished from event number. Pluractional verbs express event plurality and there is no reason to assume that the plurality cannot in principle be manifested as a plurality of participants, locations and times alike. In other words, it is no coincidence that many languages use a single marker for iterative/ temporal and participant-based cases.123,124