Lexical and Grammatical Reciprocity: Perspectives from Romance, Bantu and beyond

Abstract

In English, reciprocal meanings can be expressed through two distinct strategies: grammatical and lexical. Grammatical reciprocity involves dedicated elements that target a verb’s argument and express mutuality, as in the sentence “The girls kissed each other”, whereas lexical reciprocity is expressed by an intransitive predicate, as in “The girls kissed”. Unlike English, many languages do not clearly differentiate between these two reciprocal strategies. Reciprocal interpretations are commonly associated with the element “si” in Italian, or with the verbal marker “an” in Swahili, without an apparent distinction between lexical and grammatical processes. This thesis focuses on the characterization of lexical reciprocity as opposed to grammatical reciprocity, particularly in Romance and Bantu languages where only one reciprocal form is available on the surface. The proposed analysis studies the contribution of reciprocal markers in these languages, and covers a broad cross-linguistic sample of phenomena that are distinctive of lexical reciprocal predicates. By analyzing central semantic and morphosyntactic properties of reciprocals, this thesis offers a unifying perspective on the characterization of reciprocity across languages, irrespective of whether they show an evident distinction between lexical and grammatical processes.