Chapter for Handbook of North American Languages.
Verbs are the canonical way that languages allow speakers to talk about events, but events are slippery things. Imagine how hard it would be, for instance, to watch a short video of an action scene and try to decide how many distinct events took place. Languages often circumvent this problem by having morphological marking on verbs that makes clear the structure of the events being discussed. In particular, languages often have pluractionality marking that makes clear that a plurality of events are being discussed, and this marking often makes clear how this plurality of events is being individuated for counting (e.g., by taking place in different locations, or with different participants, etc.). Languages also often mark distributivity on verbs, which is a category that disambiguates how events are related to participants. This chapter will provide a crosslinguistic survey of pluractionality and distributivity, focusing especially on Native North American language. It will also present strategies for determining the types of pluractionality and distributivity available in languages for which those categories have not been extensively documented.