The reciprocal -an in Ndendeule

This article describes the reciprocal -an and its morphosyntactic and semantics in Ndendeule, a Bantu language spoken in southern Tanzania. As in other languages, the reciprocal constructions in Ndendeule express several situations, including prototypical or mutual situations, chain, collective situations, melee, radial, and iterative situations. Most reciprocal constructions involve minimally two participants. Some of the reciprocal situations may involve only one actor. The data from Ndendeule show that the underlying sense of the different situations is the diversity of relations. The verbal derivation is also recognized as the antipassive, a feature traditionally associated with ergative languages. The suffix has a flexible order with other verb extensions, resulting in different meanings.