| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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exchange. In a recent work on group therapy in psychoanalysis, for example, the term reciprocity means little more than interaction (or “intersubjectivity”), where it is only ever good.44 This seems to be a dubious conclusion, because a reciprocal relationship in group therapy may involve hostile interactions. However, perhaps even this kind of negative reciprocity may be regarded by the therapist as better than no interaction at all. In contrast, reciprocity in mathematics or physics is presumably value-free, although I am not qualified to make a judgment in these subjects.
The case of linguistics is not only more relevant to translation studies but also easier to follow. The linguist Ekkehard König pointed out that economists, anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers have much narrower concepts of reciprocity than the ones delimited by formal means in natural languages.45 In linguistics, grammatical reciprocity is value-free, as shown in the following examples of coreference between subject and object:
- 1. Mary and John love each other.
- 2. The professors of this institute admire each other.
Both statements are in the form of a reciprocal statement, but neither implies an ethical judgment. Some readers may find reciprocal love to be more praiseworthy than reciprocal admiration, but the statements themselves are ethically neutral.
Coreference between subject and object is also found in reflexive constructions, where again the object indicates that its interpretation is dependent on that of the subject. In English, reflexive statements take a form that cannot be confused with reciprocal statements. An example of the former is
- 3. The professors of this institute admire themselves.
Reflexive structures, in contrast to reciprocal structures, do not express a symmetric relationship or event, and as such, they are clearly distinguished