On Reciprocity

e description of the reciprocity phenomenon is more tricky than it is supposed in grammatical handbooks: It must cover both the issues of lexicon and of syntax and of their interplay as well. e lexical counterpart of the English expression each other is not the central (core) means for denoting reciprocity in some Slavonic languages, esp. in Czech. e troublemaking Czech reflexive se/siplays a substantial part of responsibility for reciprocal relations. With some lexical items there is no surface expression of reciprocity, as we will demonstrate later.1 e distinction between reciprocity as a part of lexical meaning of particular lexical items (see Section 2) and reciprocity as a syntactic relation between some participants of the syntactic construction seems to be universal. However, a lexical item that is characterized by the feature of inherent lexical reciprocity could be used in asymmetric (syntactically non-reciprocal) constructions (see the asymmetry between John and Mary in (1) and the symmetry of their respective roles in a syntactically reciprocal construction (2)): 1. Jan se setkal s Marií v divadle. [John met Mary in the theatre.] [John-Nom se-Refl meet-3sg Prep-with Mary-Instr...] 2. Jan a Marie se setkali v divadle. [John and Mary met each other in the theatre.] [John-Nom and Mary-Nom se-Refl meet-3pl...] From the other side, many items lacking the lexical feature of reciprocity can be used in syntactically reciprocal constructions (see (3)): 3. Jan a Marie se fotografují (navzájem).2[John and Mary photograph each other.] [John