Reciprocals in Russian Sign Language

Abstract: Reciprocity is well studied in spoken languages but significantly less so in sign languages. Despite that, sign language data can provide us with new and different ways to understand reciprocal semantics due to modality differences. The objective of this article is to describe strategies of encoding reciprocal semantics in Russian Sign Language (RSL) and to compare them to ones found in spoken languages and other sign languages. For that purpose, I used direct elicitation and RSL corpus data. The analysis revealed that in RSL, three semantic types of reciprocals are distinguished (prototypical, chaotic, and chaining) by different kinds of reduplication combined with change of movement and orientation and the use of classifier constructions. Iconicity and the use of space, which are important features in a language in the visual modality, affect the structure of lexical reciprocals, types of grammatical polysemy, derivation meaning in core signs and classifiers, use of metaphor, and reference in derived reciprocal verbs.