Thursday, October 23, 2014

Dairwueh: Reciprocality

In Dairwueh, reciprocal subjects (as well as reciprocal objects of causative verbs) can be coordinated with a special conjunction, 'balə'. Thus "Ardil and Kreŋx see each other" turns into "Ardil balə Kreŋx tidir (ekin)", where ekin is an optional third person plural object pronoun, and tidir is the verb 'see' in third person singular. With a single noun in the plural, balə operates a bit like a preposition - in several dialects, it even triggers some non-nominative case when used with a single noun.

A few dialects repeat balə before each reciprocal subject - basically along the lines of "Balə Ardil balə Kreŋx tidir", but with sound changes and other grammar changes involved as well, so the actual dialectal form might be something like /bar aðil balkrəx:tiðr:/

For non-object reciprocals, explicit third-person plural pronouns resolve ambiguities.

The reciprocal conjunction interacts in complicated manners with non-nominative subjects. In a few dialects, the conjunction itself is marked by a case suffix, and the subjects have the 'default marked case', whichever that happens to be in the relevant dialect. This seems to have been a rather common strategy earlier, but now, most dialects affix balə (often in the form -valə) to the verb whenever this situation appears. Finally, another branch of dialects have generalized the non-object reciprocal approach - X.dat(subj) verb each other →balə X.nom verb they(gender congruence with X).dat. This seems to present a nominative subject, but congruence is seldom used, and it would rather seem as though the nominative constituent is just a hanging constituent that provides something for 'they' to refer to.

For reciprocal objects of a causative verb (i.e. 'X makes Y and Z hit each other'), matters are not particularly much more complicated. Causatives have a bit of a differential object marking - genitive vs. accusative, with the accusative implying a lack of volition on the part of the causee combined with a very active and intentional causer.  The conjunction, again, takes a case marker with the accusative, but no marker when corresponding to the genitive. With a plural noun as causee, balə/balar precedes as a preposition, and the noun often has the case it would normally have in that position.

For more complicated things like 'X and Y make each other hate tulips', extra pronouns are added, giving for instance 'X balə Y hate.cause eket tulips.acc', similar to the solution used for non-object reciprocals.

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