Nominal Reduplication and Pluractionality in Turkish

Abstract

This paper investigates the pluractional nominal reduplicative (PNR) construction in Turkish, where nominal reduplication is employed for expressing a plurality of events involving a repetition in participants, time, or space. This study characterizes the construction in question as a pluractional construction and identifies two types of PNR constructions: participant-oriented and event-oriented. In terms of function, the participant-oriented PNR construction is employed to distribute events across different participants, while the event-oriented PNR construction is used to distribute events over time and space. From a morphosyntactic perspective, the former can be analyzed as a depictive construction, whereas the latter can be analyzed as an adverbial construction. Furthermore, this study compares the PNR construction with other pluractional constructions in Turkish, highlighting its multifunctional nature in contrast to the specialized pluractionality expressed by other constructions.