Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. doi: 10.1007/s11049-016-9334-z.
This paper presents cross-domain evidence that natural language makes use of two types of group entities that differ in terms of how they cohere. The first kind of groups, which I call swarms, are defined in terms of the spatial and temporal configuration of their members. The second, which are the canonical group entities, are defined in terms of non-spatiotemporal notions. To motivate this distinction, I present systematic differences in how these two types of group entities behave linguistically, both in the individual and event domains. These differences support two primary results. First, they are used as tests to isolate a new class of group nouns that denote swarm individuals, both in English, as well as other languages like Romanian. I then consider a crosslinguistically common type of pluractionality, called event-internal in the previous literature (Cusic 1981; Wood 2007), and show that its properties are best explained if the relevant verbs denote swarm events. By reducing event-internal pluractionality to a type of group reference also available for nouns, this work generates a new strong argument that pluractionality involves the same varieties of plural reference in the event domain that are seen in the individual domain.