Frequentative

Abstract: By interpreting atelicity as unbounded pluractionality, we can treat uniformly the atelic nature of (silent) frequentative, continuative and gradual aspect, of activities and states, of imperfective aspect, and of frequency adverbs. This provides a novel way of distinguishing the latter from cardinal adverbs and from adverbs of quantification.

Abstract: The verb "pounce" describes a single, near-instantaneous event. Yet, we easily understand that, "For several minutes the cat pounced'" describes a situation in which multiple pounces occurred, although this interpretation is not overtly specified by the sentence's syntactic structure or by any of its individual words—a phenomenon known as "aspectual coercion." Previous psycholinguistic studies have reported processing costs in association with aspectual coercion, but the neurocognitive mechanisms giving rise to these costs remain contentious. Additionally, there is some controversy about whether readers commit to a full interpretation of the event when the aspectual information becomes available, or whether they leave it temporarily underspecified until later in the sentence. Using ERPs, we addressed these questions in a design that fully crossed context type (punctive, durative, frequentative) with verb type (punctive, durative). We found a late, sustained negativity to punctive verbs in durative contexts, but not in frequentative (e.g., explicitly iterative) contexts. This effect was distinct from the N400 in both its time course and scalp distribution, suggesting that it reflected a different underlying neurocognitive mechanism. We also found that ERPs to durative verbs were unaffected by context type. Together, our results provide strong evidence that neural activity associated with aspectual coercion is driven by the engagement of a morphosyntactically unrealized semantic operator rather than by violations of real-world knowledge, more general shifts in event representation, or event iterativity itself. More generally, our results add to a growing body of evidence that a set of late-onset sustained negativities reflect elaborative semantic processing that goes beyond simply combining the meaning of individual words with syntactic structure to arrive at a final representation of meaning.

Abstract: In this study I present a comparative and historical analysis of “frequentative” Bantu verb-stem reduplication, many of whose variants have been described for a number of Eastern and Southern Bantu languages While some languages have full-stem compounding, where the stem consists of the verb root plus any and all suffixes, others restrict the reduplicant to two syllables Two questions are addressed: (i) What was the original nature of reduplication in Proto-Bantu? (ii) What diachronic processes have led to the observed variation? I first consider evidence that the frequentative began as full-stem reduplication, which then became restricted either morphologically (by excluding inflectional and ultimately derivational suffixes) and/or phonologically (by imposing a bisyllabic maximum size constraint) I then turn to the opposite hypothesis and consider evidence and motivations for a conflicting tendency to rebuild full-stem reduplication from the partial reduplicant I end by attempting to explain why the partial reduplicant is almost always preposed to the fuller base