reciprocals as subjects

[Amiridze, Nino]

Excuses for additional posting. The previous message was by mistake sent
under the subject 'control and body')
**************

Dear colleagues,

Last year I posted a query about subject appearences of reflexives. You
have been very kind and helpful to provide me with references and
comments. This time I would like to ask you another question. I would
really appreciate it if you could help me with data and/or references on
subject occurances of reciprocal expressions.

I will remind you that some languages allow reflexives to appear as
subjects. For instance,
Basque (cf. (1), Xabier Artiagoitia (p.c.)), Nepali (Bickel&Yadava
2000), Greek (Anagnostopoulou&Everaert 1999), Dargwa (Kibrik 1997),
Georgian (cf. (2))...:

 (1)     neure buruak hilko nau
         my head-DET-ERG it.kills.me aux
         Lit.: Myself kills me

 "Something like my personality, the things I do and worry
 about... that is going to kill me"

 (2)     shen-ma tav-ma gatsama shen
 your-ERG head-ERG (s)he-tortured-you you(NOM)
 Lit.: Yourself tortured you
 "Something related to you made you suffer"
  (the only reading available is with non-physical torture))

 Georgian also allows reciprocals as subjects (cf. (3) and also Tuite
1998):

 (3)     ertmanet-i k'lavt ivane-s da meri-s
 each.other-nom it.kills.them John-dat and Mary-dat
 Lit.: Each other kill John and Mary
 "Something related to each other makes John and Mary suffer"

It would be very helpful if anyone could point me out any other language
having reciprocals as subjects. If something like (3) is allowed in some
language then what are the verb classes / verb readings allowing the
phenomenon?

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Nino Amiridze

Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University

References:

Anagnostopoulou, Elena. and Martin Everaert. 1999. Towards a More
Complete Typlogy of Anaphoric Expressions. Linguistic Inquiry 30:97-119
Bickel, B. & Y.P.Yadava. 2000. A fresh look at grammatical relations in
Indo-Aryan. Lingua 110:343-373.
Kibrik A.E. 1997. Beyond subject and object: Toward a comprehensive
relational typology. Linguistic Typology 1-3, 279-346.
Tuite, K. 1998. Kartvelian Morphosyntax: Number Agreement and
Morphosyntactic Orientation in the South Caucasian Languages. München:
LINCOM Europa.