Seminar Series: Abstract

09:30
August 26 2009
Seminar Room A

Reciprocity in Language and Beyond
Anneliese Kuhle (Linguistics, ANU)

Reciprocity in Language and Beyond Anneliese Kuhle, Linguistics, Freie Universität Berlin Scientists often draw on reciprocity as a key-concept in explaining human-specific behavior, social organization and morality. Biologists, for one, have had a long-standing interest in the origins of reciprocal behavior in humans and other animals. Some primatologists argue that all true forms of reciprocity evolved in the ancestral line we share with nonhuman primates like chimpanzees. Others, like Michael Tomasello, challenge this continuity claim by reserving certain forms of reciprocity to humans alone. Interestingly, linguists, too, have become fascinated with reciprocity as a language category, investigating the different ways in which languages employ formal means (lexical and/or grammatical) in order to express situation types in which two or more participants interact with each other reciprocally. In dealing with these different concepts of reciprocity – from anthropology and behavioral biology, on the one hand, and linguistic typology, on the other – this talk will address the question of whether or not the linguistic discussion of reciprocity might benefit from behavioral and socio-cultural concepts in explaining languages’ tendency to formally encode reciprocal situation types. Anneliese Kuhle is a PhD student from the Department of English Philology at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She is currently a visitor at the Linguistics Department at the RSPAS (until May 2010) while continuing to work on her research topic ‘The semantic core of reciprocal constructions and its relationship to biological concepts of reciprocity’.