Colloquium: Sean Nonnenmacher, "Who says you can’t teach an old affix new tricks? Rethinking derived reciprocity in Eastern Armenian"

This paper uses a task-based sociolinguistic methodology to assess how social and linguistic factors affect derived reciprocal encoding in the Yerevan dialect of Modern Eastern Armenian (YMEA). Two research questions are considered. First, does YMEA speakers’ choice of derived reciprocal strategy (monosemous reciprocal pronoun or polysemous reciprocal suffix) exhibit socially conditioned patterning in terms of gender, age, or region of ancestry? Also, do linguistic factors, such as features of nominal coreference, predicate derived reciprocal type (Nedjalkov and Geniušienė, 2008), and an unattested factor of predicate symmetry affect the use of the polysemous reciprocal suffix, which variously encodes reciprocity, reflexivity, anticausitive meaning, and passive voice? An analysis of data from a correction task and a forced-choice task using chi-square and Fisher exact statistical tests provides evidence that YMEA derived reciprocal strategies do not exhibit socially conditioned patterning, although linguistic factors of coreferent animacy, coreferent humanness, and predicate symmetry seem to have an effect on reciprocal encoding. Thus, the YMEA polysemous verbal suffix, which Armenologists (Dum-Tragut, 2009) and typologists (Nedjalkov et al., 2007) have both called an “archaic” marker of reciprocity, may have some reciprocal potential left in it yet. Importantly, this preliminary investigation uses a hybrid methodology to investigate reciprocity in an under-studied language in American and Western European scholarship while building on existing typological accounts of reciprocal systems, broadening understanding of synchronic morphological variation, and encouraging greater consideration of usage-based and exemplar models of language change (e.g., Thompson and Hopper, 2001; Bybee, 2015).

References:

Bybee, J. (2015). Language change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.

Dum-Tragut, J. (2009). Armenian: Modern Eastern Armenian. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Nedjalkov, V.P. & Geniušienė, E.S. (2007). Questionnaire on reciprocals. In V.P. Nedjalkov, E.S. Geniušienė, and Z. Guentchéva (Eds.), Reciprocal constructions, pp. 379-434. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Nedjalkov, V.P., Geniušienė, E.S. & Guentchéva, Z. (2007). Reciprocal constructions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Thompson, S.A & Hopper, P.J. (2001). Transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: Evidence from conversation. In J. Bybee and P.J. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, pp. 27-60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.