Comitative arguments in Hungarian

Discontinuous reciprocal constructions are often argued to be symmetric in the sense that both the subject and the comitative with-argument are treated as having the same semantic and thematic properties. This paper presents data from Hungarian that challenge this view. The subject argument and the comitative argument are shown to differ in their semantic and thematic properties as well as in their syntax. Reciprocal predicates are identified primarily at the level of argument structure by analysing their second argument as having a distinct thematic role of its own.