This dissertation explores two reciprocal expressions in Russian, drug druga and reciprocal sja verbs to determine their distribution, semantics and pragmatics. I argue that while these two expressions are similar in many ways, they also differ in subtle ways not before discussed. While the empirical foundations of this dissertation are data from Russian, my findings have empirical and theoretical consequences for both the formal semantic and the typological literature on reciprocity.
In English, the reciprocal expression each other has been studied in detail to explore the relations between participants it is compatible with (Langendoen 1978, Dalrymple et al. 1998b, Beck 2001). For example, the sentence in (1) is compatible with a context in which (i) each artist painted each other artist or each artist painted just one other artist.
(1) The four artists painted each other.
In this dissertation, I explore the meaning of reciprocal expressions in Russian to discover whether these expressions have the same meaning as each other and whether they contribute any meaning other than relations between individuals. My data comes from both a corpus study utilizing the Russian National Corpus and elicitation with native speakers of Russian.
My results suggest that while both drug druga and the sja verbs, like each other, also convey more than one relation between individuals they also contribute other semantic content to a sentence. For example, they both introduce a temporal restriction on events. Some of the sja verbs semantically restrict events to simultaneity, and I argue that drug druga gives rise to an implicature that the events are simultaneous. I also explore two different syntactic constructions the reciprocal sja verbs occur in and find a number of semantic differences between the two constructions. I conclude that the syntactic environment of a reciprocal expression can affect its semantics. I furthermore find that drug druga is restricted against occurring with the preposition s when it introduces a relation of accompaniment to a sentence.
My findings suggest that while reciprocal expressions convey a set of relations between individuals, they also contribute other semantic and pragmatic content that is sensitive to a number of factors. Furthermore, I argue that while reciprocal expressions exhibit some uniformity in their meanings, these meanings also differ. I provide a formal analysis based on those proposed for English each other by Dalrymple et al. (1998b), Sabato and Winter (2005) and Dotlacil and Nilsen (2008). My analysis extends this account to the Russian expressions and captures other semantic and pragmatic properties beyond relations between individuals. The core of the semantic analysis consists of proposed lexical entries for drug druga and the reciprocal sja verbs, whose truth conditions allow the right predictions about the behavior of these expressions in comparison to each other (and each other) and other reciprocal expressions.