Different Dimensions of Pluractionality

Abstract

This paper investigates the semantic properties of pluractional adverbial constructions and proposes a semantic analysis to derive the possible interpretations compositionally. Mainly discussing the hanpeney hanassik 'one at a time' construction and the maypen 'each time' construction, this paper argues that there are two kinds of pluractionality: structurally derived pluractionality and lexically derived pluractionality. Pointing out that a lexical approach to pluractionality can not successfully account for the possible interpretations of the hanpeney hanassik construction, Oh (2006a) proposes that the pluractional interpretations are derived from the scope interactions between D-operators and the arguments of the sentence. This paper extends this analysis and test it on the maypen construction to derive its interpretations. Although this kind of structural analysis somewhat succeeds in deriving the interpretations, it is argued based on some empirical evidence that a lexical approach which assigns the pluractional force to the lexical denotation of maypen should be chosen over a structural approach. It is shown that we can account for the property of pluractionality and derive the interpretations more efficiently by allowing two different kinds of pluractionality.