Reciprocals in Turkish

Abstract

This paper discusses various reciprocalization strategies in Turkish, including lexical, pronominal, and verbal reciprocals, as well as the collective and discontinuous constructions that appear with symmetric predicates. We propose that there are two distinct sources of reciprocity in Turkish: symmetry and distributivity–reciprocity. Lexical and verbal reciprocals are established via symmetry, whereas pronominal reciprocals are formed via distributor–reciprocator operators introduced by the reciprocal pronoun birbiri ‘each other’. We argue that the verbal reciprocal morpheme -(I)ş is ambiguous between a symmetric reciprocal head (vRECP) and a pluractional head (vRL). The symmetric reciprocal head vRECP turns an asymmetric transitive predicate into a symmetric transitive predicate by creating two event variables as subevents of a single eventuality and permutes the thematic roles across the arguments of the predicate. Our proposal builds on the idea that symmetric predicates introduce plural events consisting of atomic subevents as their parts. This double-sourced analysis allows us to account for a range of facts involving collective and discontinuous constructions. We argue that both discontinuous and collective constructions are transitive and that collective constructions are formed through a combination of the two reciprocal sources (symmetry and distributivity–reciprocity) with an unpronounced reciprocal pronoun. We also provide an account of the reciprocal–pluractional syncretism of the -(I)ş suffix, arguing that the symmetric reciprocal head vRECP and the pluractional head vRL share a common [pl] feature spelled out as -(I)ş.

Keywords

• reciprocals
• symmetry
• pluractionality
• Turkish