Alternation ‘Reflexive-reciprocal alternation of IVs’ (Coded)

All morphologically transitive IVs except for ganiyu ‘say/do’ can take a suffix -ji/-ja which encodes both the reflexive and reciprocal function in the narrow sense, i.e. its use is restricted to agents acting upon themselves, or multiple agents acting upon each other. It thus has no additional functions such as middle or inchoative marking. In complex predicates, the productivity of reflexive/reciprocal marking is only restricted by semantic compatibility. Formally, reflexive/reciprocal marking results in both morphological and syntactic intransitivity of the IV, i.e. the IV takes the intransitive paradigm of pronominal prefixes, and a single absolutive argument in the function of A=P.

Verb Meaning Verb form Basic coding frame Derived coding frame Occurs Comment # Ex.