On the functional relationship between the Czech reciprocity markers navzájem/vzájemně and spolu

The paper presents an analysis of utterances extracted from a corpus of written Czech that contain the adverbs navzájem/vzájemně ‘each other, mutually’ or the adverb spolu ‘with each other’ used as markers of reciprocity in a way that does not correspond to the semantic type of the reciprocal expression that the marker syntactically combines with. When used in this way, the two markers are interchangeable and thus represent grammatical variants. The paper focuses on the functional and semantic differences between the two variants, as well as on possible motives for using the non-basic variant. The general semantic relationship between the variants is also examined, taking into account their relative frequency of use.