PREDICATE PLURALITY, PREDICATE-ARGUMENT STRUCTURE AND THEIR INTERACTION IN NENETS

• Main Author: Andrey Shluinsky
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: nenets
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.485.6154; http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/uhlcs/LENCA/LENCA-2/information/datei/2-shluinsky.pdf

In contemporary aspectology the distinction between “phase ” and “quantitive ” aspect is generally accepted (cf., for example, Plungian 1997). As regards quantitive aspectual meanings, the distinction between “iterative ” (in the broad sense, i. e. including “multiplicative ” type) and “distributive ” types of predicate (or “verbal”) plurality (cf. Dressler 1968: 62-74; Khrakovskij 1989: 22-50; Dolinina 1996: 232-245) is also generally accepted. In the first case a situation with the same set of participants is repeated several times (as in Russian: U etoj ženš’iny izbivali syna ‘This woman’s son was beaten’). In the second case a different participant (or participants) takes part in the situation each time (as in Russian: U mnogix ženš’in po-izbivali synovej ‘Many women’s sons were beaten’, where the prefix po- is the marker of distributivity). In other words, “iterative ” meanings in the domain of predicate plurality do not presuppose any change in the predicate-argument structure of the sentence (the predicate maintains the initial set of arguments and their marking in the syntactic structure), whereas “distributive ” meanings do entail changes in the predicate-argument structure (the predicate changes its set of arguments, and this change is often attended with changes in the syntactic structure, cf. Russian: Mal’čik dal d’evočke jabloko ‘The boy gave the girl an apple’, and Mal’čik dal d’evočkam po jabloku ‘The boy gave each girl