Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Detail #196: Pronouns pertaining to Contrary Interests

Consider situations where people together do something, all in order to safeguard their own interest – in opposition to each others' interests. Although it seems unlikely that nouns would have such forms - except maybe a few specific nouns - plural pronouns could imaginably have forms for this, especially subject forms. 'We negotiated a truce' could then have two different meanings depending on which form is used:
weregular negotiated a truce → we had negotiations with them that concluded with them and us reaching a truce
wecontrary negotiated a truce → we1 and 2 negotiated a truce between us1 and 2
This could extend to more collaborative verbs as well:
weregular got married → both of us found spouses whom we married
wecontrary got married → we married each other
Basically the name of the pronoun type could be something like 'preemptively reflexive/reciprocal pronoun' or something. However, since the type of reflexivity/reciprocality is not specified – i.e. there's no, for lack of a better, more specific term, pseudo-resumptive pronoun to tell us the actual role that the subjects take with regards to one another – this creates some nice ambiguity while also dissolving some ambiguity.

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