Visualizing the conceptual space of pluractionality
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Lukas Denk
Abstract
This paper seeks to improve the understanding of the conceptual structure of pluractionality, a bundle of functions denoting the plurality of events. By conducting a multidimensional scaling analysis on 366 marking strategies from the 183-language sample in Mattiola, Simone (2019. Typology of pluractional constructions in the languages of the world. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins), a spatial model is presented showing the semantic distance of pluractional functions as Euclidean distance. This quantitatively induced conceptual space differs in some way from the space proposed by Mattiola (2019) comprising data from only a small fraction of the sample. The analysis reveals that the conceptual space could be interpreted as defined by two prominent dimensions: a vertical dimension that represents the boundedness of events and a horizontal dimension that represents participant-oriented versus event-oriented plurality.
Acknowledgments
This research was conducted as part of the international project “Uniform Meaning Representation” under the direction of William Croft, with the further aim to construct a semantic annotation scheme informed by high linguistic diversity (grant 1764091 by the National Science Foundation). Special thanks to Meagan Vigus who assisted me with running the data for the analysis.
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