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

568 Nicholas Evans, Alice Gaby, and Rachel Nordlinger
(31) a. Rtangka-ya=kanta ngawu pala-tha, thungal-urlu-ya.
man-erg=3sg.a.pst dog hit-ind stick-com-erg
‘The man hit the dog with a stick.’ (Keen 1983: 248, ex. 229)
b. Purlti-nyju-tha=lingka wangal-kurlu
hit-rec-ind=3pl.s.pst boomerang-com
rla:-nthu-tha=lingka miyarl-urlu.
spear-rec-ind=3pl.s.pst spear-com
‘They speared one another (with spears) and hit one another with
boomerangs.’ (Keen 1983: 234, ex. 145)
In each of these examples, then, all the grammatical indicators point the same
way: the case marking on the arguments themselves, the form of pronominal
affixes or clitics, and case marking on other NP elements agreeing with subject
NPs, all signal that the reciprocal clause is intransitive.
4. Mixed strategies
We now turn to languages exhibiting “mixed” transitivity properties, where the
tests for transitivity contradict each other just in this construction type. As argued
in Section 2, these languages pose a variety of interesting problems since
they highlight the ambivalent nature of reciprocity with respect to argument
structure.
4.1. Case marking and core argument structure
In languages with productive ergative-absolutive case marking, there is normally
a strong correlation between the case marking of the subject and the
transitivity of the verb. Transitive verbs generally have ergative subjects, and
intransitive verbs generally require nominative or absolutive subjects. In a number
of languages, however, reciprocal (and sometimes also reflexive) constructions
are counterexamples to this generalization: there may be only a single
argument in the ergative case or, conversely, two arguments in the absolutive/nominative
case.
4.1.1. Single argument, in ergative. In some Australian languages with
ergative-absolutive case marking, the reciprocal construction may be unique in
allowing an ergative-marked subject in an otherwise intransitive clause (i.e.,
these languages do not otherwise allow single ergative arguments). This situation
is found in Badjala (Bell 2003: 131) in which reciprocal constructions
have just a single syntactic argument, yet the subject may be inflected with
either the (regular) nominative case (32a) or the ergative case (32b). Example
(32a) has the structure of a regular intransitive clause. In (32b), on the other
hand, the reciprocal construction has the intransitive property of having only a