Reflexive-reciprocal polysemy in South-Western Bantu

Abstract This chapter focuses on reflexive-reciprocal polysemy within South-Western Bantu and combines a comparative study of synchronic morphosyntactic variation with a reconstruction of its historical development. Many languages of this major clade use either the common Bantu reflexive prefix or a larger construction involving it for the grammatical expression of prototypical reciprocity. It is argued that such reflexive and reflexive-based reciprocals represent a second historical cycle in the innovation of reciprocal marking, which started with the development of semantically non-compositional complex suffixes, such as -as(y)an and -angan, expressing prototypical reciprocity. These cycles of functional change correlate with the observed tendency of simplex non-reflexive reciprocal reflexes of Proto-Bantu *-an to evolve into lexicalized middle suffixes.