1 The Morphological Expression of Plurality and Pluractionality in Mandarin Niina Ning Zhang July 2015 [To appear in Lingua] Abstract This paper reports the fact that the morpheme that expresses the plurality of individuals and the one that expresses the plurality of events or actions are the same derivational reduplicant in Mandarin Chinese. It is seen in AABB nouns and AABB verbs. Thus, an instance of cross- categorial quantification is attested morphologically. With respect to word formation, the fact can be explained if the reduplicant is combined with a base first and then a functional element is merged with the combination, and the categorial features are projected from the functional element alone (categorization). Thus, not only roots, but also derivational affixes, can have no categorial features. As a consequence, the existence of acategorial plural markers indicates that number features can be integrated not only after categorization, realized as inflectional affixes or functional elements, but also before categorization, realized as derivational affixes. The same is true of gender and animacy features, cross-linguistically. Keywords plural, pluractionality, derivational, category, selection, reduplication, Chinese Highlights  Plurality and plurationality is expressed by the same reduplicant in Mandarin.  The root of AABB nouns and verbs are acategorial.  The reduplicant of AABB nouns and verbs are acategorial.  Acategorial plural markers can be integrated into a structure before categorization. Acknowledgment Much of this work has benefitted from discussions with James Myers, Gary Shyi, Shih-Peng Shih, Adam Zheng, Xiaolong Fan, Liching Chiu, Xi-qian Lin, the audience of my talk at the Center for Research in Cognitive Sciences of National Chung Cheng University (Nov. 2014). I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. This research has received grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, ROC. 1. Introduction In Mandarin Chinese, if a base A is reduplicated, a word in an AA pattern is formed. For example, xing ‘star’ has an AA counterpart xing-xing ‘star’. If a base is composed of two elements, A and B, it is possible to reduplicate A and B respectively, forming an AABB word. In the AABB noun hua-hua-cao-cao ‘flowers and grasses’ in (1a), for example, the two components hua ‘flower’ and cao ‘grass’ are both reduplicated. 1 (1) a. naxie huahua-caocao b. naxie riri-yeye those RED.flower-grass those RED.day-night ‘those flowers and grasses’ ‘those days and nights’ The empirical issue of this paper is the formal properties of AABB words in Mandarin Chinese. The AABB word in (1a) refers to several flowers and several grasses, and the one in 1 Abbreviations in the glosses of Chinese examples: BA: causative marker; CL: classifier; DE: associative marker or sentence-final particle; EXP: experiential aspect; PRF: perfect aspect; PRG: progressive aspect; RED: reduplicant. In AABB examples, each root is glossed once, and RED of the total reduplication appears at the left-edge of the gloss line. For another type of total reduplication word, ABAB word (e.g., (13)), RED appears at the right-edge of the gloss line. This is just one way to distinguish the two types of reduplication. Any other ways of labelling the examples should be equally fine.