Pluractionality and diachrony: The case of -nkéd in Old and Middle Hungarian

Abstract This paper contributes to our cross-linguistic understanding of pluractional adverbials through an in-depth, corpus-assisted study of the N(um) -nkéd construction in Late Old and Early Middle Hungarian. We argue that N(um) -nkéd pluractionals are (i) mereological-only, (ii) they can be associated with the agent, theme, time or location of the eventuality, (iii) they can modify states as well as events and (iv) they cannot instantiate pluractional comparisons across substates. These findings call for a more fine-grained cross-linguistic approach to pluractional adverbials, especially in terms of the mereological-scalar dichotomy: in addition to (i) context and (ii) the type of the N(um)-denotation, (iii) the morphosyntactic makeup of the pluractional also has to be taken into account. Adopting a diachronic approach will also enable us to shed light on a somewhat neglected aspect of pluractional adverbials: their functional load, especially in terms of the division of labour vis-à-vis universal quantifiers (‘day-by-day’ vs. ‘every day’) and distributive operators (‘all the boys one-by-one’ vs. ‘each boy’). By observing changes playing out in the Late Old Hungarian to Early Middle Hungarian as evidenced in corpora, we will show that the development and spread of bona fide universal quantifiers and of the partitive-distributive suffix -ik indeed happened in tandem with a sharp reduction of the frequency of the relevant types of pluractional adverbials.