The present book has been prepared by the Language Typology Workshop of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Linguistic Research.
The book continues the earlier studies of the Workshop addressing the syntactic structure of the sentence: (ed. A.A. Kholodovich) Typology of Causative Constructions, "Nauka": Leningrad, 1969, (ed. A.A. Kholodovich) Typology of Passive constructions, "Nauka": Leningrad, 1974, (ed. V.P. Nedjalkov) Typology of resultative constructions, Amsterdam 1988, etc.
The monograph focuses on the semantic category of multiplicity of situations realized in utterances. The main objective of this work is, by proceeding from content to form, to determine grammatical, lexical, and contextual means of expressing the specific meanings of plurality, viz. the iterative, the multiplicative, and the distributive both in a single language and in different languages.
The book consists of three parts. Part 1 outlines the theory suggesting one of the possible ways of interpreting the category of situational plurality.
Part 2 has four sections and 24 chapters describing the category of situational plurality in structurally different languages. These descriptions are quite uniform and, on the whole, are based on the theory presented in Part 1. Section A (Chapters 1-7) deals with languages which use special grammatical markers to express the iterative, multiplicative, and distributive. Section B (Chapters 8-15) focuses on languages having specific grammatical means to express the iterative. Section C (Chapters 16-20) describes languages that have tense forms combining with iterative adverbials. Section D (Chapters 21-24) deals with languages where iterative meanings are expressed by adverbials. It is easily seen that this classification lays no claims to strict precision, its immediate aim being an intuitively acceptable classification of linguistic data. This Part was prepared by a large group of authors, including T. G. Akimova (English), E. V. Golovko (Aleut), E. A. Gruzdeva (Nivkh), E. E. Kordi (French), N. A. Kozintseva (Armenian), I. V. Nedjalkov (Even), V. P. Nedjalkov (Chukchee), M. A. Smirnova (Hausa), N. M. Spatari (Cambodian) , V. A. Stegnij (Klamath), N. B. Vaxtin (Eskimo), A. P. Volodin (Itelmen), V. A. Plungian (Chamalal), D. M. Nasilov (Turkic languages), I. S. Bystrov (Vietnamese), S. Je. Jaxontov (Chinese), Ju. P. Knyazev (Slavic languages), G. Z. Poumpyan (Arabic), V. M. Alpatov (Japanese), B. A. Zaxarjin (Hindi), E. \\138. Geniushiene (Lithuanian), V. P. Litvinov (Ewe), S. M. Kibardina (German), and Agus Salim (Indonesian). The three interpretations of the category of plurality presented in Part 3 (written by L. A. Biriulin, G. G. Silnitskij, I. B. Dolinina) differ from the theory developed in the preceeding chapters both in their general approach and in specific aspects of analysis. The book is supplied with an extensive bibliography.