Berlin - Utrecht Reciprocals Survey: Marker Inventory & Overview
Description
Questions concerning the symmetry or asymmetry of relations or interactions as well as those
concerning the linguistic means of describing them are not only of interest for linguistics,
but also for many social sciences, for philosophy (ethics) and even evolutionary biology.
Basic ethical principles can be expressed in terms of reciprocity and major aspects of social
structure can be described in terms of solving problems of interaction in a symmetric or asymmetric
fashion. Despite a large number of studies on reciprocity in individual languages, there is so
far, however, no integrated study on the patterns and limits of variation found across languages
in this domain. The Berlin/Utrecht Reciprocals Project, which is to be carried out jointly by
two European centers of (a)linguistic typology (Berlin) and (b) for the study of pronouns and
anaphora (Utrecht), will combine fine-grained analyses on individual languages with large-scale
cross-linguistic surveys. It aims at formulating an integrating typology for reciprocal
constructions, at developing a web-accessible database for the relevant domain and at deepening
our understanding of reciprocity, of the predicates denoting symmetrical relations (reciprocity),
of the locality restrictions on the interpretation of reciprocal arguments and of patterns of
polysemy associated with reciprocal markers. As a result of this, a new basis for the description
of individual languages and for the solution of theoretical issues will be created, which are
unsolvable otherwise.
The authors are interested in contacting language experts who would have an interest in
completing the reciprocals questionnaire for their language of expertise. If you would like to
help out, please contact Alexis Dimitriadis (Project "A typology of reciprocal markers: Analysis and documentation")
The questionnaire
PDF Download (Version: 20 November 2007)
PDF Download (Example questionnaire Futunan)
Developed by
Alexis Dimitriadis
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