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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on May 17, 2007
Journal of Semantics 2007 24(3):215-254; doi:10.1093/jos/ffm003
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Pluractional Adverbials

Sigrid Beck

Universität Tübingen

Arnim Von Stechow

Universität Tübingen

Correspondence: SIGRID BECK, Englisches Seminar, Universität Tübingen, Wilhelmstrasse 50, 72074 Tübingen, Germany, sigrid.beck{at}uni-tuebingen.de


  Abstract

This paper investigates the semantics of adverbials like ‘page by page’ and ‘stone upon stone’. An analysis is developed in which sentences containing such adverbials have a pluractional semantics; that is, pluralization affects simultaneously the event- and the individual-argument slot of a predicate. Sternefeld's (1998) system of plural operators is used and extended for this purpose. The adverbial constrains the relation that is pluralized and makes visible a higher plural operator. In the case of ‘page by page’-type adverbials, this is a fairly standard operator that leads to a simple divisional interpretation. In the case of ‘stone upon stone’-type adverbials, the operator has a stronger semantics that leads to a sequence interpretation. The generality of our theory permits straightforward extension to data like ‘she ran and ran’ and ‘she climbed higher and higher’, among others. Finally we propose that inclusive alternative ordering reciprocals (Dalrymple et al. 1998) have a pluractional sequence interpretation as well.

Received for publication 28 March 2006. Revision received 30 October 2006. Accepted for publication 12 December 2006.


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