Pluractional posing as progressive: A construction between lexical and grammatical aspect

This paper proposes an analysis of an aspectual construction in Jaminjung, a non-Pama-Nyungan Australian language of the Mirndi family. At first sight, this looks like construction conveying grammatical aspect, specifically progressive, since it bears both formal and functional resemblances to typical progressive constructions. At closer investigation, however, the two morphemes crucially involved in the construction, a grammatical morpheme = mayan and a 'semantically light' inflecting verb, in their combination can be shown to convey lexical rather than grammatical aspect:=mayan, which occurs in a wider range of contexts, can be analysed as a marker of iterativity, and the inflecting verbs -yu 'be' and -ijga 'go' signal atelicity of different flavours, and are selected as classificatory verbs in analogy to other closed-class verbs in complex predicates in Jaminjung. The findings support a distinction made in the literature between event-internal and event-external pluractionality. Of all pluractionals, only event-internal iterative expressions (which include not only complex predicates but also iterated direct speech) are overtly marked as atelic in Jaminjung, and only those exhibit the functional overlap with a progressive. The study of this construction thus provides an insight into the pathway of grammaticalization between lexical and grammatical aspect. © 2012 The Australian Linguistic Society.