UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ WAYS OF PLURALIZING EVENTS A dissertation ...

248 Pages·2012·1.62 MB·English

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
1.1
This is a single-spaced version of the submitted dissertation. It corrects a few
minortyposandpage50nowdiscusseswhataappearstobeadialectsplitseparating
eastern and western Kaqchikel only discovered after the dissertation was officially
submitted. There have been no substantive changes to the analyses within.
1.2
Thisversioncorrectssomeunfortunatecopy-pastetyposintheglossesin§1.3.1.
1.3
I changed the diagrams on page 139-140 to make the issues clearer.
ii
Copyright (cid:13)c by
Robert Henderson
2012
Table of Contents
List of Figures vii
Abstract viii
Dedication x
Acknowledgments xi
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Outline of the dissertation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.2 Methodological note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3 A Quick Introduction to Kaqchikel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.3.1 Alignment and basic order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.3.2 Derivation and verb classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
I Plural Events 25
2 Event-internal vs Event-external Pluractionality 26
2.1 Formal foundations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1.1 Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1.2 Cumulative Closure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.1.3 Thematic roles and spatiotemporal traces . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2 Typologicalpreliminaries: event-internalvsevent-externalpluractionals 34
2.3 Previous approaches to the internal/external split . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.3.1 Cusic 1981: Origins of the internal/external split . . . . . . . 38
2.3.2 Lasersohn 1995: The first formal account . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.3.3 Wood 2007: A group-based account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.3.4 Tovena and Kihm 2008: Group-based pluractionality
in Romance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.3.5 van Geenhoven 2004: Pluractionality and atelicity . . . . . . 43
iv
2.3.6 Summary of the previous approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3 Event-external Pluralization 47
3.1 The morphosyntax of –löj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
3.2 Aspect and the interpretation of –löj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.2.1 Aspectual insensitivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.2.2 Non-contiguous repetition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.2.3 Habitual readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.3 Distributive and dependent pluractionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.3.1 The interaction of predicative distributivity and –löj . . . . . 58
3.3.2 The interaction of distributive quantification and –löj . . . . 60
3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.5 –löj and non-atomic event reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.5.1 Accounting for aspectual insensitivity and entailment . . . . 65
3.5.2 Deriving vague plural cardinality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.5.3 Accounting for habitual readings and variable downtime . . . 76
3.5.4 τ-based pluractionality as a source of atelicity . . . . . . . . . 79
3.5.5 Accounting for distributive readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
3.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4 Event-internal Pluralization 93
4.1 Morphosyntax of –Ca’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
4.2 Aspectual selection for semelfactives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
4.3 Contiguous repetition on a single occasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
4.4 Contextually specified high cardinality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
4.5 Opaqueness to distributivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
4.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
4.7 A group-based analysis of –Ca’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
4.7.1 Accounting for distributivity and cumulativity . . . . . . . . 109
4.7.2 Accounting for aspectual selection and restricted entailments 114
4.7.3 Atelicity: A loose end . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4.8 Spatiotemporally-defined group nouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4.8.1 Background on groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
4.8.2 Grove-type groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
4.8.3 Grove-type groups and event-internal pluractionality . . . . . 128
4.9 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
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II Plural Events and Quantification 136
5 A First Pass at Pluractional Distributivity 137
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
5.2 Pluractional distributivity and its interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . 141
5.3 A θ-role based account of –la’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5.4 Interim conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
6 Dependent Indefinites: Licensed by evaluation pluractionality 154
6.1 Previous approaches and the typology of
dependent indefinites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
6.1.1 Strong licensing: Russian nibud’-indefinites . . . . . . . . . . 157
6.1.2 Weak licensing: Telugu reduplicated-indefinites . . . . . . . . 159
6.1.3 The middle case: Romanian/Hungarian dependent indefinites 161
6.2 Dependent indefinites and distributive pluractionality are evaluation
plural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
6.2.1 Formal preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
6.2.2 Dependent indefinites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
6.2.3 Distributive pluractionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
6.2.4 Summary discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
6.3 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
6.4 Going compositional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
III Plural Events and Degrees 193
7 English Pluractional Adverbials 194
7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
7.2 Basic data and previous approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
7.2.1 NUM-BY-NUM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
7.2.2 N-BY-N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
7.2.3 Recasting incrementality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
7.3 Scales and X-BY-X adverbials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
7.4 An analysis in increments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
7.4.1 Extending the account to NUM-BY-NUM . . . . . . . . . . . 220
7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
8 Conclusions and Future Research 222
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List of Figures
1.1 Children eating three tortillas each. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2 Children eating three tortillas total. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.3 K’ichean-branch Mayan languages (after Kaufman 1974; Richards 2003) 17
1.4 Kaqchikel-speaking region following Icke 2007 (Lago Atitlán in blue). 17
1.5 Standard Mayan orthography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.6 Ergative or Set A: [before C] / [before V] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.7 Absolutive or Set B: [before C] / [before V] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.8 Glossing conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.1 –löj as a temporal modifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.2 –b’iyinilöj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.3 –löj blocks atomic events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.4 Contiguous plural events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.5 Non-contiguous plural events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.6 Collective reading of Xeb’ixanilöj; cf. 209 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
4.1 An example of a –Ca’ event. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
4.2 Xikitz’etetz’a’; cf. 278 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
4.3 Xurochora’; cf. 288 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
4.4 Minimize endstates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
4.5 Atoms, Groups, and Pluralities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
6.1 Typology of indefinite plurality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
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Abstract
Ways of Pluralizing Events
by
Robert Henderson
The central claim of this dissertation is that there is more variation than previously
recognized 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
ofpluractionalsuffixesintheMayanlanguageKaqchikelthatderiveverbalpredicates
that cannot be satisfied in single-event scenarios. The guiding theoretical question is
to determine the relationship between pluractionality and better understood seman-
tic phenomena such as nominal plurality and quantification. Based on original field-
work 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 plurals, and (iii)
the third class generates pluralities similar to those that are introduced when inter-
preting a quantifier like every. I further argue for a morphosyntactic spilt between
thefirsttypeofpluractionalaffixandthelattertwo. Theformercomposeswithverb
roots directly 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 nomi-
nal domain, verbs in general establish plural reference in different ways than nouns,
whichfollowsfromthefactthatevents,unlikeindividuals,areindividuatedinterms
of their participants and spatiotemporal location. I argue that to individuate the
events that constitute an event plurality, pluractionals structure the way that a spa-
tiotemporaltracefunctionortheta-rolefunctionmapsaneventtoitsdomain. Inthe
caseofthefirsttwopluractionalaffixes,thetemporaltraceiscrucial. Inthelastcase,
the pluractional targets a verb’s thematic role. By structuring the relations between
eventsandfunctionallyrelateddomains,theKaqchikelpluractionalsaresemantically
similar to Krifka’s (1986,1992) incremental theme role or certain distributive adver-
bialmodifiersinlanguageslikeEnglishandJapanese(Brasoveanu&Henderson2009
and Nakanishi 2007, respectively). By separating out the trace-based individuation
requirements, not only is it is easier to see that there are fine-grained similarities
between types of plural nominal and verbal reference, but differences between plu-
ractional verbs and their nominal counterparts are accounted for.
Along the way, the dissertation develops novel analyses of a series of unexplained
phenomena in Kaqchikel and English. In support of the analysis of the third class
ofpluractionals,IdevelopanaccountofdependentindefinitesinKaqchikelandother
viii
languages that explains why they are licensed by being interpreted both in the scope
of a quantifier and as an argument of certain pluractionals. The analysis not only
permits a better understanding of dependent indefinites in Kaqchikel, but it clarifies
their place in a crosslinguistic typology of similar expressions (Balusu, 2006; Choe,
1987; Farkas, 1997, 2002; Yanovich, 2005, among others). Finally, I argue that in-
sightsfromtheanalysisofpluractionalaffixesinthefirstpartofthedissertationhelp
explain the behavior of so-called pluractional adverbials in English, such as one by
one or house by house (Beck & von Stechow, 2007; Brasoveanu & Henderson, 2009).
While pluractional adverbials are different than Kaqchikel pluractionals due to their
closeconnectiontoverbsofscalarchange(Hayetal.,1999;Kennedy&Levin,2008),
they are similar in that they derive plural event predicates by structuring the rela-
tionship between the event argument and a functionally related domain, in this case,
a domain of degrees. The proposal is that these adverbials fix the unit along which
theprogressofaverbofscalarchangeismeasured,andbyrequiringatleasttwosuch
increments, the modified predicates can only be satisfied by plural events.
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For Lily
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