sense; ‘they looked at each other’ a reciprocal sense). Out of context, sentence
(14) has a reflexive sense, while (15) has a reciprocal sense.
It is therefore clear that ‘reciprocity’ (‘the child has to learn that “each other”
is a reciprocal expression, nothing else’), if it is a ‘universal’, is not a syntactical
universal. And it is not hard to envisage another level to which this universality
can more credibly be attached: the reciprocal relationship is constitutive of
the relationship of interlocution as a social activity. Or, in order to speak,
there must be at least two people and the reflexive is a particular instance of
the reciprocal (whence the fact that the sentence ils se parlaient first of all has
a reciprocal interpretation [they were talking to each other], but can, if required
by the context, assume a reflexive sense [they were talking to themselves]).
Reciprocity is thus the expression in language of the otherness constitutively
involved in the linguistic relationship. The syntactical constructions, in their
variety, express this relationship. (French, like English, uses several: ils se
parlaient, ils se congratulaient mutuellement[they were congratulating each
other], ils se moquaient l’un de l’autre[they were mocking one another], chacun
était jaloux de l’autre[each was jealous of the other].) It is the relationship
which is universal, while the syntax varies from one language to the next
and within each language.
In reality, the embodiment of this (‘interlocutory’) social linguistic relationship
in an innate syntactical structure (‘reciprocal expression’ and the principles
for selecting the antecedent that characterise it) is an example of a phenomenon
with which Marxists are familiar: fetishism. A social relationship is reduced
to the condition of a thing (to be specific, a genetic and/or neuronal inscription
in the brain). Chomsky’s false concretisation (which imparts a ‘material’ reality
to reciprocal expression) is, in fact, a further degree of abstraction with respect
to the scientific abstraction required to isolate and thus explain the phenomenon:
linguistic science does indeed need to construct, starting out from the phenomena,
a concept of the ‘reciprocal’. Such abstraction squared is characteristic of
fetishism.
We can even try to go further. Chomsky has chosen a good example. The
reciprocal construction is rare (my English grammar informs me that there
are fewer than 60 occurrences of the reciprocal pronoun per million words,
as opposed to 25,000 for demonstrative pronouns);^14 and pertains more to
Critique of Linguistics • 31(^14) Biber et al.1999, p. 347.