Pluractionality in progress

Abstract

The goal of this dissertation is to describe and analyze the interaction of pluractionality, a kind of event plurality, and the progressive aspect. Based on original fieldwork, I present novel data showing that, in Balinese, when pluractional VPs combine with progressive aspect, we get some kinds of pluractional interpretations but not others. In particular, this combination yields iterative readings, where a series of events happen one after another a single occasion, but not habitual ones, where a series of events happen over a much longer period of time. Using the analysis of the progressive in Landman (2008), I argue that this result is expected if the progressive requires a particular kind of coherence, called cross-temporal identity, in the development of an event over time. The plural events in an iterative scenario have such coherence, while those in habitual scenarios do not. Turning to the habitual readings of the English progressive, I argue that these sentences should be decomposed into a progressive operator, a pluractional operator, and an operator that introduces a causative relation between eventualities called dispositional causation (Copley 2018). This additional device, which is unavailable with the Balinese progressive, allows the English progressive to describe habitual scenarios.

Finally, I attempt to extend this analysis to American Sign Language (ASL). ASL is argued to use iconicity to describe properties of event structure (Wilbur 2003, 2008; Kuhn & Aristodemo 2017; Kuhn 2017). To address the prevalence of the use of iconicity in eventuality descriptions, I conducted an elicitation survey in ASL. I find that repetition is widespread in ASL, being used in both habitual scenarios and episodic ones, which are not straightforwardly analyzed as involving pluractionality. I conclude that the most straightforward analysis of this kind of repetition in ASL is that it represents a general imperfective marker.