Reciprocal constructions (review)

The collective monograph under review is the most recent and substantial contribution of the late Vladimir Nedjalkov (1928–2009) to the field of typology. Compiled and edited in the tradition of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg School of Typology with the assistance of Emma Geniušien and Zlatka Guentchéva, the five volumes manifest all of the strengths of this typological school: parallel and in-depth treatment of more than forty languages from different language families guided by an elaborate questionnaire, with the goal of making inductive generalizations about the form, syntax, and meaning of reciprocal constructions. Begun in 1991 and initially planned on a modest scale, the Leningrad project on reciprocal constructions expanded over the years and finally involved more than fifty scholars, who contributed fifty articles to the final volumes. Its results were not published until 2007, and it is certainly tragic that several participants, including the main instigator and editor himself, are no longer around to see how their work has been received and appreciated by the linguistics community.

What is most remarkable about reciprocal constructions is the fact that a semantically extremely complex situation or event type can be and in fact typically is encoded by a simple clause, as shown in 1.

(1) People in this village help each other.

The characteristic features of this event type include most or all of the following: a plurality of participants, symmetry (mutuality) of relations or events in contrast to the typical asymmetry of event construal in natural languages, double thematic roles of participants, joint actions or a plurality of sequential actions.

For the special case of a set of two coparticipants (reciprocants, 'mutuants'), a reciprocal construction can be paraphrased by a coordination of two converse propositions, as shown in 2, and this equivalence—with the directionality given—can in fact be used as a test to identify reciprocal markers (381, 336).

(2) Paul hates Bill and Bill hates Paul = Paul and Bill hate each other.

For larger sets such paraphrases are no longer possible, not only because of the length of the resultant coordinate structures, but also because of the fact that reciprocal constructions may differ in 'strength': that is, they may only require that a relevant subset of the participants (reciprocants) manifest mutual configurations (cf. Dalrymple et al. 1998).¹ The example given in 1 and those in 3 (9), which even exclude strict mutuality, are cases in point.

(3)

1. a. Inhabitants of these islands used to eat each other.

2. b. We decided to wake each other up in the morning.

Given the semantic complexity and the variability and vagueness of reciprocal constructions, it is not surprising that languages have developed a wide variety of formal devices for encoding them. The major goal of this monograph is to systematize the knowledge of these complex structures obtained on the basis of fine-grained analyses of languages from different families in the form of crosslinguistic generalizations.

The content of the five volumes is organized as follows. The first volume is entirely dedicated to general questions. After two brief forewords, one by BERNARD COMRIE and the other by the editor, Volume 1 lays out the theoretical background and descriptive framework of the individual studies. It contains basic definitions and basic information on methodology, as well as all crosslinguistic observations on syntactic and semantic properties of reciprocals derived from the language-specific chapters. The volume presents detailed discussions of specific aspects (e.g. underived and derived lexical reciprocals like friend, meet, similar to, with) and also includes a questionnaire. The language-particular studies of reciprocity are found in Volumes 2–4, whose make-up is based on semantic criteria: languages exhibiting different patterns of polysemy (reciprocal-reflexive, reciprocal–sociative, reciprocal–iterative, and others) are described in different volumes, and each volume is structured according to the additional formal distinction between verbal and pronominal markers. It is thus possible to retrieve some basic typological information from the organization of the volumes alone. Furthermore, there is a...