Variation of Adverbial Markers of Reciprocity in Czech

This paper presents a study on variation between adverbial markers of reciprocity in Czech: navzájem/vzájemně ‘each other, mutually’ and spolu ‘with each other’. The study demonstrates in practice what method quantitative-qualitative empirical research on grammatical variation should follow. The qualitative analysis can be integrated with the quantitative description in a two-step manner: (1) the qualitative analysis is often necessary to determine the frequencies of the variants; (2) an in-depth qualitative analysis should follow to establish the functional relationship between the variants. The two adverbs form a semantic opposition (navzájem/vzájemně indicates binary conjunctive reciprocity, while spolu indicates single-event reciprocity) but become variants if certain semantic and pragmatic conditions are met. The corpus analysis showed that the co-occurrence of navzájem/vzájemně with single-event reciprocals is facilitated when the number of reciprocants is greater than two.