A core reciprocal event involves two participants performing the same action, at the same time on each other. Most languages recognize this as a special type of event to be encoded in a dedicated construction. This project aims to provide a typology of syntactic constructions, and to investigate how such constructions are extended to events that vary in the number of participants, temporal organization, event type, and the “saturation” of relationships across the participant set (how many participants acted or were acted on). By representing two or more overlaid events with permuted participant roles, reciprocal constructions are perhaps the most complex event descriptions regularly encoded by monoclausal syntax; they are also important for our understanding of social cognition because of the fundamental role of reciprocity in human societies.

Representative publications

• N. Evans, A. Gaby, S.C. Levinson and A. Majid (eds.) (in prep). Reciprocals and Semantic Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Contact persons

Asifa Majid and Nick Evans