[Lingtyp] Items that make frequency/rate/tempo modifiers from nouns

Mon May 23 21:44:21 UTC 2022

 Dear Liz, dear all,I think there are indeed 2 types, a distributive one and an incremental one.With units of time, Romanian has the following types, which are distributive (one event per time unit): - an adverbial use of the derived adjective (zilnic from zi 'day', săptămânal from săptămână 'week', lunar from lună 'month', anual from an 'year')- the construction Noun - de "of/from" - Noun: zi de zi, lună de lună etc.With other nouns, if with each noun the event becomes "bigger" - more of its incremental argument is affected - a different construction is used: Noun - cu "with" - Noun:  distrug oraşul casă cu casă "they-destroy the-city house with house" (= house by house), asfaltăm drumurile kilometru cu kilometru  "we-asphalt the-roads kilometer with kilometer"
Best,Ion

    On Monday, May 23, 2022, 11:45:14 PM GMT+3, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:  

Dear all,

I would tend to agree with Johanna that most or all of the cases of reduplicated nouns cited by Liz involve distributivity.  Cross-linguistically, reduplication is the most widespread strategy for marking the distributive-share in a relationship of distributivity.  The most common case is that in which reduplication marking the distributive-share occurs on numerals (see https://wals.info/chapter/54); however, in some languages, the construction generalizes from numerals to other word classes, including verbs, adjectives, and — as in the examples cited by Liz — also nouns.

For example, in the Hebrew

(1)       hem arzu mizvada-mizvada

            3PLM pack.PST.3PL DISTR~suitcase

            'They packed one suitcase at a time'

the activity of packing is conceived as mereologically plural, denoting a set of packing sub-activities, each of which is associated with a single suitcase.  Thus, the packing is the distributive key, and the suitcase its distributive share. 

For distributivity to obtain, there must be a plural distributive key; otherwise it is blocked.  (This is why you can't say *Mary ate three apples each.)  In many cases, as in (1) above, the plural distributive key is verbal, giving rise to pluractionality.  But the semantics of distributivity is more complex, involving a binary relationship between two items, the distributive key, which may or may not be a pluractional verb, and the distributive share — which is often marked by reduplication.

David

 On 23/05/2022 21:48, Johanna Laakso wrote:

 Dear Liz, dear all, 
  the Hungarian suffix -nként is known by the name "distributive", and so is the Estonian derivational suffix -ti (and its Finnish cognate -ttain/-ttäin). These adverb suffixes in Uralic are sometimes borderline cases between case inflection and derivation, and Jussi Ylikoski has discussed this Estonian "dwarf case" in a few articles, see e.g. http://jultika.oulu.fi/files/nbnfi-fe202002125279.pdf . 
  Perhaps it's just because I have been socialized with a different terminology, but I don't see these suffixes as primarily expressing "pluractionality" or "increment" or "increase". In my view, the point is "division" rather than "addition". The typical context for these adverbs is not "something increases for every X" but rather "there is one Y for each X", "Y is divided between all the X's". 
  Best, Johanna
      -- Univ.Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso Universität Wien, Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (EVSL) Abteilung Finno-Ugristik Campus AAKH Spitalgasse 2-4 Hof 7 A-1090 Wien johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at • http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/ Project ELDIA: http://www.eldia-project.org/  

 Elizabeth Coppock <eecoppock at gmail.com> kirjoitti 23.05.2022 kello 19.58: 
  Dear all, 
  I am working on compiling a list of lexical items (words, affixes, or constructions) that take a noun and produce an adverb that expresses a frequency, rate, or tempo. Examples include: 
  - English -ly as in "daily", "monthly" (which seems to be limited to a small set of time expressions in the relevant usage; *He gave a playly breakdown of the game.) - The English "X-by-X" construction, as in "day by day", "brick by brick" (instances of which have been described as "pluractional adverbials") - Hungarian -nként as in "naponként" 'daily', "hektaronként" 'by hectare" - Reduplicated nouns in Hebrew as in "yom yom" 'day [by] day', or "mizvada mizvada 'suitcase [by] suitcase' (Gil 1995) 
  What I'm looking for could be described as "items that create pluractional adverbials when combined with a noun", where the noun specifies some increment at which the event type in question takes place. Googling "pluractional adverbials" does not produce a lot of results outside of English, so I wonder if there is a better term to search by. 
  (Pluractionality markers that go on verbs and reduplicated numerals would not fit the description, but a lot of reduplicated nouns probably would.) 
  Any and all leads would be most appreciated. Thank you very much in advance. 
  Cheers, 
  Liz Coppock
 Department of Linguistics Boston University  _______________________________________________
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