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

Valency and reciprocity in Australian languages 583
b. Barra-h-marnû-yaw-nanhna-rr-ûn.
3du.s-ass-ben-child-look.after-rr-pr
‘They look after each other’s children.’
c. Barra-h-drahm-irr-inj kanj-no.
3du.s-ass-not.give-rr-pp meat-3sg.possd
‘They two wouldn’t give each other the meat.’
A further piece of evidence that reciprocalized ditransitive verbs still have
two arguments comes from the fact that the ergative use of the instrumental
case, optionally found on the subjects of transitive clauses, sometimes appears
with reciprocals of ditransitive verbs (54); this contrasts with reciprocals of
transitives, with which it is so far unattested.
(54) Wurdurd-yih yabbunh barra-h-ngabbu-rr-inj,
child-instr two 3du.s-ass-give-rr-pp
barra-h-yurrmirr-inj.
3du.s-ass-swap-pp
‘The two kids give each other (food), they swap (food).’
The evidence from reciprocals formed from three-place verbs in Dalabon is
thus clearly divided on the question of valency: the pronominal prefixes are
those found with intransitive, monovalent verbs, while the behaviour of incorporated
nominals, and the availability of instrumental/ergative marking on
subjects, are those found with transitive, divalent clauses.
5.3. Wambaya: Nominative-accusative (S:O) case frames for reciprocals of
ditransitives
As we saw in Section 3.2.2, Wambaya exhibits another type of mismatch in
reciprocalized ditransitive constructions. In this case, the subject appears in
nominative, rather than ergative case, despite the presence of an overt object
NP, as in (55) (repeated from (36) above). This is the only time in Wambaya that
a regular accusative object co-occurs with a subject in the nominative rather
than the ergative case. Based on the case assigned to the object, the clause looks
transitive, while based on the case assigned to the subject, it looks intransitive.
(55) Ngarringga wurlu-ngg-a alaji gambada wardangarri.
take.from 3du.a-rr-nf child(acc) sun(nom) moon(nom)
‘The sun and the moon took each other’s child.’ (lit., The sun and the
moon took a/the child from each other.) (Nordlinger 1998: 239)
5.4. Objects and trivalent reciprocals: Summary
What is common to all three of the Australian languages for which we have
(at least some) data on reciprocals in ditransitives is that the choice of either