Typology of Verbal Reciprocals: An Overview

This book investigates three interesting questions arising from the intriguing cross-linguistic perspective of Meitei (Meiteilon) and Nyishi, two Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the Indian states of Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh. The first question is related to developing a model for the syntax and semantics of these verbal reciprocal languages. Second, the book attempts to provide an account of the surface variations among the languages by the model. The book also tries to build an account of the co-occurrences of the nominal and verbal reciprocals in languages like Meiteilon and Nyishi. In this chapter, the author surveys various reciprocal situations and linguistic properties of reciprocals in Meitei and Nyishi. It is demonstrated that Meitei and Nyishi exhibit all six possible types of reciprocal situations. Additionally, the chapter presents diagnostics for reciprocal constructions and facts from Meiteilon and Nyishi. Both languages utilize a verbal strategy for default reciprocalization and display discontinuous reciprocity. The author argues that the reciprocal marker consists of a single suffix, as in the case of Meiteilon, and it may express several other functions following Saah (Ghana Journal of Linguistics, 7(2), 52–70, 2018) and Roy, Kumar, & Subbarao (2021). The reciprocal marker is composed of more than one suffix, as in Nyishi, and it does not exhibit polysemy. Furthermore, both languages can reciprocalize unaccusative and unergative verbs. In both languages, overt distributive nominal reciprocal markers indicate strong reciprocity. Discontinuous reciprocals and conjecture verbs also exhibit strong reciprocity even without nominal reciprocal markers.