Reciprocal strategies in Middle English

Abstract

In Present-Day English mutual situations are encoded either with lexical reciprocals or with reciprocal markers (each other). This was not the state of affairs in Middle English, which encodes mutual situation by means of both syntactic and morphological or clitic markers. The present paper will describe the inventory of morphological and syntactic devices of the Middle English reciprocal system in terms of semantic or syntactic constraints of usage, in order to shed light on its change into the typologically different Present-Day English reciprocal system. This development can be indeed explained in terms of a general restructuring of co-reference (reflexive and reciprocal) marking which took place in the course of the Middle English period.