Pluractional Verbs: An Overview
Paul Newman · 2012
Pluractional Verbs: An Overview Almost three decades ago, I proposed the term PLURACTIONAL to describe verb forms whose function was to indicate plurality of action or event (Newman 1980).In the intervening years, there has been increased interest in the phenomenon by scholars working in many areas of linguistics from phonology to morphology to semantics.There has also been widespread adoption of the term, to the point where it was deemed familiar enough to warrant a head entry in the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Newman 2006) and in the Dictionnaire de Sémantique (Laca 2006).This paper is organized into four parts.Part I consists of an overview of the pluractional concept.In Part 2, I describe the introduction and adoption of the term.In Part 3, I discuss generalizations about pluractionals that one can draw from the range of studies now at our disposal.In Part 4, I present what I consider to be unanswered questions about pluractionals that deserve increased attention by descriptivists, theoreticians, and typologists.