Concepts of reciprocity and their encoding in the languages of the world

old_uid2474
titleConcepts of reciprocity and their encoding in the languages of the world
start_date2007/03/20
schedule10h-12h
onlineno
summaryReciprocity lies at the root social organization and has preoccupied scholars of many disciplines. In this paper I will discuss various concepts of reciprocity developed in such fields as biology, ethnology, philosophy and sociology and relate them to semantic distinctions drawn within linguistic analyses of reciprocal constructions. Furthermore an overview of the typologies recently developed for such constructions by Nedjalkov (to appear), Evans (2007) and König & Kokutani (2006) will be given. It will be shown that these typologies are much more complex than the surprisingly robust one developed by Faltz (1985) for the neighbouring domain of reflexivity. I will discuss some plausible reasons for this additional complexity as well as some recent attempts at developing a semantic analysis for various reciprocal constructions that takes the observable formal variation seriously.
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