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Request for information: distributivity

From:Tim May <butsuri@...>
Date:Monday, May 6, 2002, 14:46
I'm interested in including some kind of grammatical indication of
distributivity in LC-01, but I don't know much about it.  As I
understand it, an action which applies to a plural argument is
distributive if it is considered as a number of seperate actions
(eg. "he closed each door" vs "he closed all the doors").  So the
distributive might imply that these actions were sequential, and maybe
distributed in space, or unrelated to each other, while the
"undistributive" might imply the reverse, that they occurred
simultaneously, and perhaps in the same place, and form a single
entity.

Rick Harrison's essay on verb aspect mentions distributive aspect

 !The distributive aspect indicates that an action occurs in a
 !"one-after-another" manner. An example, from Russian: on zaper vse
 !dveri `he locked all the doors' (non-distributive) versus on
 !pozapiral vse dveri `he locked all the doors individually, one by
 !one.'

Joshua Shinavier's Danovën does something that might semantically be
similar to the distributive in it's distinction between collective and
seperative noun plurals.

Beyond this, I don't know much.  I'd be interested to hear about how
the distributive (or equivalent formations) are employed in various
conlangs and natlangs.  Thank you for your attention.