On the use of the reciprocal marker jeden - druhý in contemporary Czech

The article deals with the use of the reciprocal marker jeden - druh & yacute; in contemporary Czech. As I show in the introductory section, although bipartite quantifiers of this type are quite common means of expressing reciprocity across languages, the situation in Czech has not been devoted much attention so far. I thus analyze 1000 randomly selected attestations of the expression jeden - druh & yacute; from the SYN2020 corpus, focusing on both their semantic and formal features, including reciprocal/non-reciprocal meaning, type of reciprocity, preposition and case marking of the expression druh & yacute;, type of syntactic subject, complexity of the phrase containing jeden/druh & yacute; and linearization preferences; correlations between these features are also pointed out. Based on the results of the analysis, I then give a description of five different types of contexts in which jeden - druh & yacute; is used and I argue that these structural types can be thought of as successive stages of a grammaticalization process leading to the emergence of reciprocal uses and their gradual spread to new types of contexts; this process includes typical features of grammaticalization such as the decrease in semantic compositionality and morphosyntactic transparency.