The morphosemantics of incremental plurality in Hualapai (Yuman)

Abstract

Hualapai is a Yuman language with a verbal morphological system, seen in various languages of the region, which poses difficulties for a compositional analysis. In particular, Hualapai verb morphology exhibits incrementality (see Baerman 2016, 2019, 2024), where there is no one-to-one mapping between forms and meanings. Instead, forms are ordered on a scale tracking morphological complexity, and more complex morphological forms are mapped, all things being equal, to meanings that are higher on some semantic scale. In the case of Hualapai, the incremental system concerns a plurality, which in this case conflates plural argument marking and plural event marking, also known as pluractionality. This paper provides the first compositional morphosemantic treatment of Hualapai verbal plurality, which in addition, is used to think about how we might handle such incremental systems in general using standard morphological and semantic tools