In honour of the new book that's being launched in the department this afternoon: Reciprocals and Semantic Typology (edited by Nick Evans, Alice Gaby, Steve Levinson and Asifa Majid), I thought I'd mention what 'reciprocals' are in linguistics and give some examples from a few common languages. (Given that I haven't seen the book yet, the examples given may be somewhat contradictory to what is given in the book.)
Those of you familiar with the concept of 'reciprocity' (or the Chicago number which the title of this post comes from) will know that it involves an 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine' or 'you be good to Mama, Mama's good to you' attitude. Similarly, 'reciprocals' in linguistics typically refer to grammatical structures that encode events where a participant is doing something to another while another participant or participants are doing the same thing to the first participant at / around the same time.
Languages do this in a number of ways. One way is to use a free standing pronoun. English uses this strategy somewhat, with each other and one another the most common ways of marking reciprocity. English grammars often treat these as 'reciprocal pronouns', but at least one editor of the book treats them differently, though they are still considered to be noun phrases. In any case, some examples in English include:
They hit each other. (By the way, linguists love using the verb 'hit' when they need a transitive verb.)
We help one another.
(Also:
We scratch each other's backs.
Mama and you are good to each other.)
Russian uses друг друга 'drug druga' (in the accusative case) or друг другу 'drug drugu' (in the dative case).
Они били друг друга.
'They hit each other.'
Мы помогаем друг другу.
'We help one another.' (lit. 'We help to one another.')
A second tactic would be to use a 'bound pronoun' or clitic. People familiar with Romance (and Slavic) languages will know the recognise the pronoun se which really can't stand by itself as a full word that can be stressed and needs to attach itself to the verb.
For instance, in French we have:
On se voit bientôt.
'We'll see each other soon.'
Ils s'aiment.
'They love each other.'
Those of you familiar with the concept of 'reciprocity' (or the Chicago number which the title of this post comes from) will know that it involves an 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine' or 'you be good to Mama, Mama's good to you' attitude. Similarly, 'reciprocals' in linguistics typically refer to grammatical structures that encode events where a participant is doing something to another while another participant or participants are doing the same thing to the first participant at / around the same time.
Languages do this in a number of ways. One way is to use a free standing pronoun. English uses this strategy somewhat, with each other and one another the most common ways of marking reciprocity. English grammars often treat these as 'reciprocal pronouns', but at least one editor of the book treats them differently, though they are still considered to be noun phrases. In any case, some examples in English include:
They hit each other. (By the way, linguists love using the verb 'hit' when they need a transitive verb.)
We help one another.
(Also:
We scratch each other's backs.
Mama and you are good to each other.)
Russian uses друг друга 'drug druga' (in the accusative case) or друг другу 'drug drugu' (in the dative case).
Они били друг друга.
'They hit each other.'
Мы помогаем друг другу.
'We help one another.' (lit. 'We help to one another.')
A second tactic would be to use a 'bound pronoun' or clitic. People familiar with Romance (and Slavic) languages will know the recognise the pronoun se which really can't stand by itself as a full word that can be stressed and needs to attach itself to the verb.
For instance, in French we have:
On se voit bientôt.
'We'll see each other soon.'
Ils s'aiment.
'They love each other.'
French also has the phrases l'un l'autre (for 2 participants) and les uns les autres (for more than 2 participants) which are comparable to English one another, but they're still used in conjunction with se to add emphasis to the pronoun (or so I'm led to believe by French grammar books).
Il s'aiment l'un l'autre.
'They love each other.'
A third strategy would be to use an adverb, like mutually in English. Although in English, you often still need to have the pronoun, as in:
They mutually dislike each other.
Mandarin typically uses the adverb 互相 hù xiāng to make a reciprocal construction (I usually associate its use with 'positive' actions, but I know it can be used with less mutually beneficial actions.)
我们互相帮助。
'We help each other.'
There are numerous other ways in which languages mark reciprocity, and I'm fairly certain most are covered in the book. From what I've read of the blurb, the book also considers whether the concept of reciprocity is the same across all languages, or if they are best viewed as a cluster of related ideas.
Some of you may be wondering why on earth anyone would be interested in reciprocals. I'm not sure if I have any real insight into the matter myself, since reciprocals don't really fascinate me the way other aspects of grammar do. Nevertheless, these constructions occur across languages (though they make take different guises), and any learner of a foreign language will have to, at some point, learn how to use such constructions in the target language.
In any case, shouldn't the sentence 'We should help one another' be something we ought to utter more often, in any language? (Sadly, the only sentence with a reciprocal that I have in Sumi is: Nikujo ithi kile acheni. 'We used to know each other.)
