Reciprocity in the Qur'ān: Toward a syntactic and semantic analysis

Reciprocity has received a certain amount of attention in individual languages and groups of languages, but there is scant work on reciprocity in Arabic. This article contributes to filling this gap by examining the associations between reciprocal constructions and their semantics in the Qur'ān. Analysis of periphrastic reciprocal, lexical reciprocal constructions, and parallelism shows that their semantic readings are affected by the syntactic features of each structure: (a) a strongly reciprocal interpretation only exists when both the verb and the noun phrase are in the dual or evidence parallelism; (b) there is partial strong reciprocity when the reciprocal relation belongs to the same group; (c) weak reciprocal interpretations can be expressed in both periphrastic and lexical forms.