When evaluative morphology, pluractionality and aspect get tangled up: a case study of French suffixed verbs

International audiencePluractionality is "the phenomen[on] where a certain derivational morphological marking on a verb [...] indicates that the event denoted by this verb is, in some sense, pluralized: repeated in time, distributed in various locations, holds of many participants, etc." (Greenberg 2010). In French, evaluative suffixes, when joined to verbal bases to build derived verbs, often function as pluractionality markers (e.g., mordre 'bite', mordiller 'nibble, lit. bite off small bites several times'). This paper focuses on the relation between evaluation and aspect/pluractionality and shows that verbal evaluation involves a modification of the internal structure of the event expressed by the verb, which in turn has an influence on its lexical aspect, and on its argumental structure