Pluractional verbs that grammaticise number through the part-of relation

This paper pursues an analysis of verbs like Italian mordicchiare (nibble) as event-internal pluractional verbs that denote composite single events where the predicate is distributed on the fragments of one entity, and grammaticise a local form of number through the part-of relation. This opens the possibility of reading number marking in aspectual terms, whereby fragmenting is a form of modification that perturbs the mapping between event and object.