Pluractional Motion Verbs in Turkish

In this paper, we examine a small set of motion verbs in Turkish bearing the so-called ‘reciprocal’ suffix -(I)ş: kaç-ış- ‘flee in all directions’ (cf. kaç- ‘flee’), koş-uş- ‘run helter-skelter’ (cf. koş- ‘run’), uç-uş- ‘fly helter-skelter’ (cf. uç- ‘fly’). It has previously been claimed that these are collective or sociative verbs entailing a low elaboration of events and/or plural participants. We show that these -(I)ş-marked verbs, in fact, require a higher degree of individuation of events than do their unmarked counterparts. Furthermore, we show that a stipulation directly associating the suffix with a requirement for a plural subject is both unnecessary and inadequate. Instead, we propose that the pluractional under investigation manipulates the denoted events’ spatial and temporal properties in such a way that the predicate can only be felicitously used if it combines with a plural external argument.