La réciprocité dans les langues romanes anciennes

The paper traces evolutionary pathways of various methods of expressing reciprocity found in Old French (12th century) and Old Portuguese (13–15th century) texts. Most of grammaticalization patterns responsible for the emergence of reciprocal markers and documented in human languages are demonstrated to have been active in Old Romance, too. Medieval reciprocal exponents are first compared with their Latin ancestors to show what Romance innovations consisted in and what formal means were retained throughout. Then, an account is given of how the two languages were different from each other. Finally, two suggestions are made on how current grammaticalization theory can be modified so as to grasp more efficiently the origin of reciprocal markers found in European languages.