Veerle van Geenhoven

University of Nijmegen

Aspect, pluractionality, and adverbial quantification

In this talk, I present continuous, frequentative, habitual, and gradual aspect marking as temporal pluractional operators, that is, as ways of creating unbounded pluralities of event times. I extend my pluractional analysis of verb-level frequentative aspect markers towards frequency adverbs. This provides a novel perspective on the contrast between the semantic contribution of frequency adverbs and that of "genuine" adverbs of quantification: Whereas a frequency adverb operates on the asserted event time of an utterance, an adverb of quantification (or proportional adverbs) operate on its presupposed reference time.