Valency mismatches and the coding of reciprocity in ... - Linguistics

552 Nicholas Evans, Alice Gaby, and Rachel Nordlinger
Although such formal approaches address the many-to-one correspondence
that can arise in reciprocal constructions between semantic participants on the
one hand and syntactic arguments on the other, they all assume that reciprocal
clauses are, in “surface” syntactic terms, either transitive (having two syntactic
arguments) or intransitive (having a single syntactic argument). In this
article, however, we demonstrate that languages can frequently show mixed
transitivity effects just in reciprocal constructions, making it difficult to determine
even on syntactic grounds whether a reciprocal construction is transitive
or intransitive. While such mixed transitivity effects are clearly attributable
to the competing motivations in reciprocal constructions of the low distinguishability
of subject and object on the one hand, and the clear presence of
multiple semantic participants on the other, they raise some important challenges
for formal syntactic analyses that generally treat transitivity as a clausal
property. Faced with the problem of deciding whether clauses are either transitive
or intransitive, what do we do with constructions that show properties of
both?
The goal of this article is not to develop or test particular formal analyses
of mixed transitivity phenomena in reciprocals. Rather, our goals are: firstly,
to describe the range of variation languages exhibit in their resolution of these
competing motivations as they map reciprocal semantics onto clausal structures;
secondly, to expand our typology of how these conflicts are manifested;
and thirdly, to stimulate more research into the morphosyntactic behaviours of
reciprocal constructions crosslinguistically.
2.4. Discourse transitivity and the “middle” construal
Whereas the formal accounts summarized in the previous section motivate
mixed-transitivity behaviour by appealing to different levels of syntactic representation,
there is an alternative approach to explaining the mixed behaviour
of reciprocals and reflexives within the functionalist and cognitive traditions.
This appeals to the relative indistinguishability of their participants and locates
such constructions in an intermediate position between prototypical transitive
and prototypical intransitive construction types.
In their classic treatment of transitivity as a gradient phenomenon, Hopper
& Thompson (1980) take the distinguishability of subject and object as one
parameter contributing to full transitivity. Their influential survey includes a
brief remark on reflexives (1980: 277–278) which
[...] in many languages have properties which can be explained by appealing to
their intermediate status between one-argument and two-argument clauses: compared
with one-argument clauses, they may be more Transitive [e.g., in having
reflexive object clitics in Spanish – EGN]; compared with two-argument clauses,
they typically display features associated with lower Transitivity.