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

Valency and reciprocity in Australian languages 543
Reciprocal constructions – or at least the large subset of the crosslinguistically
attested range of reciprocal construction types that are monoclausal 4 – thus
need to accomplish a complicated projection of arguments from semantics to
syntax, since each participant appears in three roles: individually as both the
first and the second arguments of a two-place predicate (owing to the crossover
of roles), and, additionally, as a subset of the argument of a one-place
predicate.
Note that this revised representation for the semantics of (prototypical) reciprocals
overlays projections from both two-place and one-place predicates
onto a single clause. This is in situations where the base predicate is divalent,
as with kiss or quarrel with. In the case of three-place verbs, like they showed
each other their tattoos or they gave each other a present, the valency of the
monovalent joint-action predicate stays the same, but the one-way predicates
are now trivalent. We thus overlay two three-place and one one-place predicate.
The relevance of these cases will become clear in Section 5, when we discuss
reciprocals of trivalent verbs.
Since spoken languages lack the possibility of representing two or more
propositions simultaneously, 5 one would expect on first principles that there
be conflicting motivations here, resulting in a range of outcomes crosslinguistically
in how these constructions are encoded, and this is exactly what we
find. At a gross level 6 the commonest choices are either to treat the reciprocal
clause as a transitive, typically filling the antecedent argument slot with a regular
NP and the other with a reciprocal expression like each other, as is familiar
from English (1), or to derive an intransitive verb by adding a special reciprocal
marker to the verb, as in Mundari (3) (Evans & Osada forthcoming), which
makes the intransitive status of reciprocal clauses particularly clear through the
presence of an intransitive suffix (-n) on the verb in addition to the lack of any
object pronominal suffix.
4. See König & Kokutani (2006) and Evans (forthcoming) for typologies of reciprocal construction
types.
5. See Haiman (1980: 433) for the point that an iconic representation of the semantic structure
of reciprocals would require an “acoustically impossible” structure in which both V(j, m) and
V(m, j) are uttered at once, so that languages must find somewhat less iconic means of representing
simultaneity iconically “within the constraints imposed on human speech, which can
put things together only ‘horizontally’ ”. It is significant that in many varieties of sign language,
where this constraint is removed, at least some types of reciprocal action (e.g., fighting)
can be shown iconically through symmetric gestures in which each hand simultaneously
undertakes the same movement (Zeshan & Panda forthcoming).
6. Again, there are in fact many other possibilities, which we do not consider in this article; see
Evans (forthcoming) for a comprehensive treatment.