In Gearthnuns, the reflexive (and reciprocal) is considered a voice and is marked on the auxiliary, which carries the load of tense and voice in the verbal complex. So: 

Söb lés chafaz. - He cut himself. 

Rhöb lés chafaz. Maybe they each individually cut themselves (a children's accident in the kitchen), or maybe there was a shiv fight out in the prison yard. 

As you might expect (this *was* based on what I knew of the European model back in the day), context and prosody prevail, but if you find yourself yawing dangerously into "l'un l'autre", "miteinander" territory, the adverb "spanga-u" bails you out. 

Kou 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Samuel Stutter" <[log in to unmask]> 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Sent: Friday, December 24, 2010 6:35:24 PM 
Subject: Re: Reflexives & Reciprocals 

The way I deal with reciprocals is the use of a reciprocal "pronoun". I stick the agents in the subject position (both having nominative case) and have a fill-in "object" / postposition (technically accusative). 

Cat(Nom) Dog(Nom) Fought (Postposition) 
The cat and dog fought each other. 

I don't have my general conlanging reference material at hand, but if my (not necessarily accurate) memory serves, there may be a method using verbal aspect. Or mood. Or something. Maybe not. 

On 24 Dec 2010, at 17:49, Logan Kearsley <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 

> I've been contemplating reflexives & reciprocals lately, and the fact 
> that they're handled in exactly the same way in all the natlangs in 
> which I know how to form such things, and wondering what other options 
> might be available. 
> 
> My conlang Gogido lacks the concept of grammatical subject (actually, 
> it lacks the concept of verb argument structure in general), so 
> typical reflexive pronouns can't work. Instead, you get reflexives by 
> chaining prepositions together to indicate that one noun phrase fills 
> multiple roles; so, "I kicked myself" is something like "By and to me 
> kicked." Reciprocals are formed by adding a clitic to the end of a 
> reflexive phrase; so, "We kicked each other" comes out like "By and to 
> us-(recip) kicked." I considered using a system of compound reflexive 
> pronouns that explicitly indicate what other role they refer back to 
> (kind of like how English has compound reflexives that indicate person 
> & number; maybe I'll still add it in as an alternative option), but I 
> rather like the elegance and simplicity of the current system; it's a 
> natural consequence of the rest of the grammar. Unfortunately, it's 
> difficult to say things like "We kicked each other and ourselves." I 
> suppose I could just add an additional reflexive-and-reciprocal clitic 
> for that, but that seems kind of like cheating. 
> 
> A system I thought up this morning takes advantage of the fact that 
> reciprocals only make sense with plural subjects; you would just have 
> one reflexive/reciprocal pronoun which is understood as reflexive with 
> a singular subject and reciprocal with a plural subject. To get plural 
> reflexives, you'd have to use a circumlocution like "Each of us 
> (kicked himself)" or "We both" / "We all". 
> 
> Then I thought you could generalize that, and get a system with only 
> one subject-referencing pronoun in which some other aspect of the 
> sentence determines reflexive or reciprocal meaning. In the first 
> case, it was subject number; but maybe you could use, say, grammatical 
> voice, so actives are always considered reciprocal and passives are 
> always reflexive, or something like that. 
> 
> Unfortunately, any of these options also seem to make it difficult to 
> combine reflexives and reciprocals in sentences like "We kicked each 
> other and ourselves." 
> Any ideas on how that might be worked around? 
> 
> What other ways are there of handling these things? 
> 
> -l.