Reciprocals across languages (2003-2005)
Professor Nicholas Evans
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.