The Ingredients of Reciprocity in Cuzco Quechua

Abstract

In Cuzco Quechua reciprocity is marked by means of two verbal suffixes, one of which is a marker of reflexivity, the other of which is a marker of pluractionality. The paper develops an analysis that composes reciprocity from these more basic notions. Two further ingredients that are needed will be argued to derive from independent principles: universal quantification over parts of the reciprocal plural agent derives from plural predication, as has been argued by other researchers for English reciprocity; distinctness of the participants in the reciprocal subevents derives from a semantic version of Condition B. This way of composing reciprocity is not universal, other languages have dedicated reciprocal markers or make other reciprocal ingredients overt. The compositional derivation of reciprocity is therefore a clear candidate for cross-linguistic semantic variation.

Templatic morphology through syntactic selection: Valency-changing extensions in Kinyarwanda

“…It is now straightforward why the reciprocal with a bound PRO does not have a reflexive meaning: a reflexive event is not distributed over either agents or patients since the same entity fills both roles and does not vary. Presenting a formal semantics of this morpheme is left for the future, though see Faller (2007) for a decomposition of reciprocity into its constituent parts, and Gluckman (2018) for an application of such a decomposition to apparent polysemy of reciprocal marking in Logoori. 15 I tentatively adopt the modified version of Ndayiragije's (2003) proposal for Kirundi that was discussed above for the Kinyarwanda reciprocal.…”

Emphatic Reciprocal Expressions and Symmetric Verbs in Spanish: An Empirical Analysis

“…Since there was not an exhaustive list of this class of verbs, we proceeded to identify all the verbs studied in the most relevant bibliography on this topic for Spanish and then we enlarged it by translating into Spanish the examples found about this topic for other languages, including typological studies (Beck, 2001;Borillo, 1971;Darlympe et al, 1998;Dimitriadis, 2008;Dotlacil, 2013;Evans, 2008;Faller, 2007;Knjazev, 2007;Kemmer, 1993;Langendoen, 1978;Otte, 2004;Siloni, 2012, among others). Given the fact that these predicates do not share formal properties that can be used in a corpus search, corpora were mostly employed only to locate examples of use for the verbs in the list.…”

The event structure of reciprocal verbs and its implications for bidirectionality

“…Authors such as Beck (2001) and Faller (2007) relate reciprocity with pluriactionality. Newman (1990) presents five possible situations that denote pluriactionality, which we have organized in two groups:…”

“…For an interpretation to be considered reciprocal Faller (2007) identifies three other requirements besides pluriactionality of the subject ([Aa]), First, the subject has to present a distributive interpretation; that is, universal quantification is applied independently over each part of the subject. This requirement is met in (3′′′), but it is also met in (3′), the reflexive interpretation.…”

“…Reciprocity, as a semantic concept, is usually understood as a relation in which at least two participants are in a situation of a symmetric nature whose main semantic characteristic is bidirectionality (Faller, 2007;. The symmetric nature of these situations explains their complexity: it entails at least two subevents and two participants both acting as Agent and Patient of the main event.…”