Detail #232: Reciprocals vs Reflexives

Reciprocals (they saw each other), and reflexives (they saw themselves) are a couple of fairly similar meanings that might not even be distinguished in any systematic manner in a language. However, we could also imagine them being distinguished in haphazard manners.

Let us consider the actions described -

they verbed each other vs. they verbed themselves

Somehow, to me at least they verbed each other seems like a single action carried out by a group, while they verbed themselves seems like lots of small actions carried out by multiple people. This might of course depend on the nature of the verb - if the verb means wash your teeth, then clearly the latter implies lots of people independently doing things, whereas if cause to lose a war is the verb involved, then the communal action interpretation might be more close at hand.

So, why not have plural congruence in the case of the separate, independent actions and singular congruence in the other case, and slowly make this also turn into plural congruence with reflexives implies reciprocality, lack thereof implies reflexivity. (It could just as well fall out the other way, but the basic principle is what I'm getting at – of course, the distinction between communal action and individuated action could also be present without influencing reflexives vs. reciprocals at all.)

We could of course take that and go in the direction of ... inverse systems. Some verbs prefer a reciprocal interpretation, some verbs prefer a reflexive one, and the inverse marker turns the interpretation around?

But that's not particularly new an idea for this blog, even though it's not been mentioned before iirc. It skates close to exoreflexive and endoreflexive verbs.

A new idea would be this, though: take the same pronoun for reciprocality and for reflexivity. Thus "them|our|yourselves" and "each other" are conflated. Now, with the reciprocal meaning, the pronoun is marked as the subject, and the noun phrase that normally would have been the subject is the object:

theyselves helped them

and the regular reflexive meaning would be

they helped themselves

This is probably typologically unattested, and maybe even breaks some universals. I have a sort of inclination to think that if the language lacks a proper subject, though, it might be more likely. Such languages seem to be syntactically ergative relatively often, so there you have an idea to play with.