18. Reciprocal constructions in Hup

This paper provides a comprehensive description of the encoding of reciprocal relations in Hup, a language of the Nadahup or ‘Makú’ family of northwest Amazonia. Hup has three morphological strategies for expressing reciprocal relations, but only one of these – the verbal preform ũh – is fully productive. The semantic range of this primary strategy extends well beyond canonical reciprocal interaction to include chains, melêes, and even ‘converse’ events, in which one participant acts non-reciprocally on another; the ‘interactional’ gram ũh is accordingly argued to have a unitary, underspecified semantics relating to interaction between two or more mutually involved co-participants. Hup’s secondary strategies include a marginal reciprocal extension of the reflexive preform hup, and the non-productive use of the preform bab’, restricted to a few lexical items. Typologically intriguing aspects of Hup’s strategies for marking reciprocal relations include the variable use of ũh and hup as prefixes or preverbal particles, the wide semantic range of ũh, and the apparent historical source of both ũh and bab’ in kin terms meaning ‘sibling’.