A discourse-sensitive typology of pluractional constructions

Pluractionality is defined as a morphological marking to express the plurality of the events encoded by the verb. This phenomenon is quite widespread across languages, though presenting a wide range of functions and forms. From the functional side, alongside their definitional functions, pluractional markers can express a wide range of functions, from aspectual to distributive and lexical-like ones, making them prone to analysis through semantic maps. At the formal level, three main marking strategies are by far the most frequent, i.e., affixation, reduplication, and lexical alternation, each with its own peculiarities. Alongside the synchronic properties, I will also give a first diachronic description of the sources and evolution paths of pluractional markers.