First Online: 21 March 2016. 12 month embargo. / This paper presents cross-domain evidence that natural language makes use of (at least) two ways of individuating collective entities that differ in terms of how they cohere. The first kind, which I call swarm reference, picks out higher-order collective entities defined in terms of the spatial and temporal configuration of their constituent individuals. The second, which corresponds to canonical cases of group reference (e.g. committee, team, etc.), makes use of non-spatiotemporal notions. To motivate this distinction, I present systematic differences in how these two types of collective reference 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 collective 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 collective 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.

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This study investigates the use of reduplication with predicative signs in Swedish Sign Language (SSL), and also the related phenomena doubling and displacement. Reduplication in SSL typically expresses plurality of events and/or referents, but may also express intensification, ongoing event or generic activity. There is a distinction between external and internal events with reduplication: external reduplication expresses some event happening over and over at different points in time and/or with different referents, and is associated with a frequentative/habitual reading; internal reduplication expresses some event consisting of several e.g. movements/actions and is associated with an ongoing reading. Only external expression seems to be applicable to stative constructions, as one would expect. The study also found a phenomenon not previously described: oral reduplication without manual reduplication. This process is found to have the ongoing functions with telic predicates, such that it focuses on the telic predicate as a single event in progress, and thus replaces the function of manual reduplication, which, with telic predicates, would instead express several events. The reading of reduplicated signs is associated with the semantics of the sign reduplicated, and it is also associated with the phonological citation form of the sign—monosyllabic signs tend to get pluractional reading; bisyllabic signs tend to get an ongoing reading. Also, the reading expressed by reduplication is connected to the presence/absence of oral reduplication. Reduplication generally does not occur in negative constructions. This study shows that inherently negative signs may be reduplicated, but reduplicated predicates are negated according to other strategies than for non-reduplicated predicates, thus reduplication has the largest scope. Doubling and displacement are both associated mainly with plural referents, and it is in this respect that they are related to reduplication, and they both occur frequently with reduplication.

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