THE IMPERFECTIVE SEMANTICS OF DURATIVE GEMINATION IN NORTHERN PAIUTE

Like other Numic languages (Uto-Aztecan), Northern Paiute has a morphological process of durative gemination, which conveys some type of aspect. I describe the semantics of durative gemination in Northern Paiute, locating it within a typology of imperfective aspect emerging from the formal semantics literature. Like the imperfective aspect in other languages, durative gemination has an event-in-progress interpretation in addition to a number of other interpretations. Somewhat unexpectedly, one of these does not depict the internal structure of an event, but rather the event as a whole. I identify parallels between this completed interpretation for durative gemination in Northern Paiute and similar interpretations for the imperfective aspect in better-studied languages.