A Study On Differences And Similarities Between Reflexives And Reciprocals And Their Semantic Implicature Relations

Reflexivity and reciprocity have always been the central issues in linguistics.As two major semantic categories that are common in most languages,reflexivity and reciprocity are different in many respects.The two differ in their requirements for the number and gender property of their anaphoric antecedents,in the event structures which they express,and in their respective morphological and syntactic codings and strategies.However,reflexives and reciprocals also show similarities in syntax and morphology.In generative grammar,both reflexive and reciprocal expressions are treated as “anaphors”.Besides,from the cross-linguistic perspective,some languages use words of the same form or of the same semantic category to express reflexivity and reciprocity,and in many languages the reciprocal expression is diachronically developed from the reflexive markers.To account for this “overlapping” phenomenon,Cable(2014)developed a formal semantic univocal analysis which is deductive,based on the Cumulativity Universal Principle,and proposed that reflexively marked predicates with plural arguments can describe situations of reciprocal action in languages which show an extensive overlap between reflexive and reciprocal markers(such as French,which uses se to express both reflexivity and reciprocity).Developing on Cable’s formal semantics ideas,the present study further proposes that theoretically reciprocal meaning is an inherent semantics of reflexive meaning in all languages,whether or not reflexive and reciprocal markers overlap in forms.To verify this hypothesis,the present study makes a survey on the semantic interpretation of plural reflexive pronouns in English,a language where reflexives and reciprocals are of different form.The survey results turn out that with a created special situation,where there are other salient entities that can contrast with the antecedent of the reflexive anaphor,the plural reflexive pronouns in English can also be used to describe reciprocal situations,lending support for the above assumption.Besides,the results show that the plural reflexive pronouns in English can also express reciprocity in basic,out-of-theblue contexts.