The Distribution of Reciprocal Pronouns in a Prescriptive Perspective

Abstract

In this article, the distribution of reciprocal pronouns in the English language is investigated. This distribution is regulated by the prescriptive rule stating that we use each other when we refer to two persons or things, and we use one another in situations when we have more than two referents. The main task of this work is to check if the rule is obeyed in practice. In order to do so, we have chosen 400 unambiguous sentences from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, including each other and one another. The results show that the prescriptive rule is violated in many instances, and that the two reciprocals are often used interchangeably. This lets us suppose that the prescriptive tradition is no longer as strong as it used to be in the past.