Detail #332: Collective Action vs Individuated Action and Verbal Suppletion

One thing conlangers sometimes try out is distinguishing whether an action with plural subjects is done in a concerted manner or rather as a bunch of individuated actions. One way of encoding this distinction could be lexical - singular verbs and one of the types of plural verbs take the same root, the other kind of plural verb takes another. Thus, a significant amount of verb stems would never be used with singular subjects (except maybe collectives).

Now, we can imagine a situation where some verbs mostly are collective, and some verbs mostly are individuated - and we can let the morphology follow that. The mostly collective verbs use the same root when collective as when singular, and the mostly individuated of course have the same root for singular and individuated plurals.

We can go on and consider how this would interact with other parts of the language. A habitual form, regardless of the number and type of the subject, is a number of individuated actions, and thus the habitual may use the same root as the individuated form, making the IND/COLL distinction overlap with TAM to some extent. Another observation would be that doing something in a confused, haphazard, incompetent way would seem to be like doing a bunch of non-interconnected actions. Thus, exceptionally using the individuated form with a singular subject when it is distinct from the singular could be a way of communication such a thing. On the other hand, a very skillful person also might seem like a one-man army doing a thing, so the use of the form would basically mean 'with exceptionally great or bad skill'. Maybe differential case marking of the subject or object could help determine which, or it'd be left to context, and prosody to communicate which one it is.