Mary Moroney and Collaborators Publish a Paper on Semantics in Navajo
Mary Moroney, Joyce McDonough, and Melvatha Chee published a paper titled "Verb stem plurality and pluractionality in Navajo" in The University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics.
Verb stems in Navajo can indicate the number of individuals involved in a verbal action: a single individual, two individuals, or more than 2 (2+), say, running or walking or a number of other verbal events. Navajo verbal morphology also has a very rich system of describing verbal action, including plurality. This paper investigates the interaction between the plurality in the Navajo verb stem and the prefixal seriative marker which indicates that a sequence of events takes place. Though these constructions are difficult to translate into English, Navajo speakers have clear intuitions about what events the constructions describe, including ambiguity. Formalizing these constructions using event semantics, this paper contributes to a broader understanding of how expressions of plurality in the Navajo verbal complex can combine together and be interpreted in context.