The present paper is devoted to the concept of reciprocity and to reciprocal expressions, which are divided into two main classes. Those belonging to the first of them signify reciprocity on their own, i.e. without any additional reciprocal markers. The other class contains expressions that acquire ability to refer to reciprocal states of affairs only as a result of appropriate transformations. Different reciprocal markers – grammatical, lexical and quantifying – are singled out and thoroughly characterized. Their use results in converting non-reciprocal signs into reciprocal ones. They are applied according to the part of speech of a modified term. The conclusion to be drawn from this analysis revolves around the discrepancy between morphological and syntactic means of reciprocal transformation. While the former ones are rather scanty, the latter are largely used in contemporary French.
The purpose of this article is to provide the lexical analysis of predicates such as face à face (‘face to face’) and côte à côte (‘side by side’), which are generally reciprocal and symmetric. Some of them are also used in an unusual way, that is, the structures in which they appear do not meet the requirements set for symmetric constructions. This imbalance, as we will show, has for the origin a semantic difference between the arguments x and y which must belong to the same semantic class if we want them to be in a symmetric relation. The question of semantic similarity within the argument structures is thus of greater importance for the semantic completeness of the reciprocal predicates. The question will be for us to recognize if, when a semantic difference occurs, we would have to deal with different (non reciprocal) meanings and if so how to describe them.
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