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The NP-strategy for Expressing Reciprocity
Typology, history, syntax and semantics
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the syntax and semantics of a single linguistic phenomenon – the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity – in synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. It challenges the assumption common in the typological, syntactic, and semantic literature, namely that so-called reciprocal constructions encode symmetric relations. Instead, they are analyzed as constructions encoding unspecified relations. In effect, it provides a new proposal for the truth-conditional semantics of these constructions. More broadly, this book introduces new ways of bringing together historical linguistics and formal semantics, demonstrating how, on the one hand, the inclusion of historical data concerning the sources of reciprocal constructions enriches their synchronic analysis; and how, on the other hand, an analysis of the syntax and the semantics of these constructions serves as a key for understanding their historical origins.
[Typological Studies in Language, 127] 2020. xv, 291 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 17 February 2020
Published online on 17 February 2020
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Symbols and abbreviations | pp. xi–12
- Acknowledgments | pp. xiii–xv
- Introduction | pp. 1–30
- Part 1. The types of constructions and their origin
- Chapter 1. The types of constructions and their origin | pp. 33–60
- Chapter 2. The diachronic development from a two-unit to a one-unit construction | pp. 61–92
- Part 2. Relics as a syntactic category
- Chapter 3. Relics as a syntactic category: Modern Hebrew and Italian constructions as frozen formulae | pp. 95–111
- Chapter 4. Heterogeneity: Languages with more than one NP-Strategy construction | pp. 113–150
- Chapter 5. Changing meaning of the NP-strategy constructions | pp. 151–182
- Chapter 6. A comparative linguistics study of NP-strategy constructions | pp. 183–195
- Part 3. The basic meaning of the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity
- Chapter 7. The basic meaning of the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity | pp. 199–238
- Chapter 8. Specifying the meaning of the NP-strategy through context | pp. 239–263
- References | pp. 265–283
- Language index | pp. 285–287
- Subject index | pp. 289–291
“The book thus can serve the needs of a wide range of readership. I encourage everyone with an interest in the natural language encoding of reciprocity to cover the whole book. It takes a unique approach in grouping together different reciprocal constructions under the umbrella term NP-strategy and in the postulation of a uniform, weak semantics for thiw whole class. The result is a novel and highly insightful contribution to the study of reciprocity, which will most probably fertilize the field in several compartments.”
György Rákosi, University of Debrecen, in Journal of Historical Linguistics 13:3 (2023).
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Bar-Asher Siegal, Elitzur A.
Landau, Idan
Bar-Asher Siegal, Elitzur
Kindt, Olga Viktorovna
Al-Raba'a, Basem Ibrahim Malawi & Yoshihisa Kitagawa
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.