Visualizing the conceptual space of pluractionality

Abstract

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.