Reciprocals across languages
A project funded by the Australian Research Council, under the Discovery Grant Scheme (Project ID DP0343354)
Timeframe: 2003-2005
Overview
Reciprocity lies at the heart of social organisation and human evolution, and the world’s 5000 languages all represent distinct solutions to the problem of how to represent and reason about reciprocity, using the resources of grammar, lexicon, prosody, gesture, and inference from context. This project examined how reciprocity is expressed, and the different subtypes of reciprocal meaning, by carrying out detailed linguistic fieldwork on fourteen little-known languages of Australia and its region. The fieldwork on the un-described (and in many cases endangered) languages was supplemented by a typological survey of how the various notions of reciprocity are expressed in languages around the world, and on the coding or reciprocity in grammar.
Project publications
The following works can be downloaded as pdfs
- Evans, Nicholas. Reciprocal Constructions: Towards a Structural Typology (865kb pdf)
- Evans, Nicholas. Dyad Constructions. Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics. 2nd Ed. (150kb pdf)
- Evans, Nicholas and Nordlinger, Rachel. Reciprocals Across Languages: Field Questionnaire Material (300kb pdf)
- Evans, Nicholas. Bibliography on Reciprocals (215kb pdf)
- Evans, Nicholas, Gaby, Alice and Nordlinger, Rachel. Compromising Transitivity: The Problem of Reciprocals (400kb pdf)
- Evans, Nicholas. Complex events, propositional overlay, and the special status of reciprocal clauses (550kb pdf)
Project personnel
Name | Role | Email address |
---|---|---|
Nicholas Evans | Chief Investigator | NRDE@unimelb.edu.au |
Rachel Nordlinger | Co-Chief Investigator | RachelN@unimelb.edu.au |
Ulrike Zeshan | Partner Investigator | U.Zeshan@latrobe.edu.au |
Steve Levinson | Partner Investigator | Stephen.Levinson@mpi.nl |
Leila Behrens | Visiting Researcher |
LB@unimelb.edu.au Leila.Behrens@uni-koeln.de |
Ruth Singer | PhD Student | R.Singer@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au |
Alice Gaby | PhD Student | Alice.Gaby@mpi.nl |
Sebastian Fedden | PhD Student | O.Fedden@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au |
Peter Hurst | PhD Student | phurst@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au |
Meladel Mistika | Research Assistant | Meladel@bigpond.com |
Ian Tupper | Research Assistant | IanTupper2260@yahoo.com.au |
Alan Lee | Research Assistant/ Web-site Maintenance | A.Lee16@ugrad.unimelb.edu.au |
Further information
- Original grant proposal (45kb pdf)
- Bibliography (215kb pdf)
- Seminars in Descriptive Linguistics: Reciprocals and Lexical Typology 175-428