Avaliação: Las Lenguas de Señas en Latinoamérica – INHERENTLY RECIPROCAL VERBS IN BRAZILIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

A reciprocal construction “denotes an eventuality that involves reciprocity between its participants” and reciprocal verbs usually bear a specific morphological marking (Siloni, 2008). We describe verbs that are inherently reciprocals in Libras and we argue that not only hand specification is relevant for the reciprocity reading in these verbs, but also movement.
Although reciprocal constructions have been described in different signed languages, most of these descriptions are focused on reciprocalization strategies that take non-reciprocal verbs and turn the construction into a reciprocal one. In this study we focus on verbs which meanings are inherently reciprocal.
From a list of 589 verbs, we extracted the verbs that were lexical reciprocals. To be considered inherently reciprocal, we followed Rákosi’s (2008) criteria: i) the verb should be unambiguously reciprocal; and ii) the verb does not require any special marking on its form or any modification of its arguments for the reciprocal relation to hold. We found 18 verbs that meet these criteria. For example, that's the case of the verbs MEET and MARRY in Libras.
Although lexical reciprocals tend to be analyzed as idiosyncratic, some phonological specifications are interesting among the inherently reciprocal verbs. The first one is that all of them are bimanual. Another observation concerns the movement specifications of these verbs. We identified two different types of movement: single (and repeated) movement and alternate movement. SHACK-UP is an example of verb a single movement, opposed to the alternate movement in COMMUNICATE. This relation between type of movement and reciprocal readings adds up to the growing body of works that claims that signed languages can make visible some semantic properties that are not usually morphologically realized in spoken languages.

• Reciprocal Verbs
• Libras
• Brazilian Sign Language