Ljubov’ drug k drugu or ljubov’ k drug drugu? : A corpus study of primary prepositions as endoclitics and proclitics with the reciprocal pronoun drug druga in Modern Russian

In Russian, prepositions used with the reciprocal pronoun друг друга ‘each other’ typically behave as endoclitics, placed between the two parts. However, proclitical placement of primary (non-derived) prepositions with друг друга is more frequent than previously recognized. Contrary to what is sometimes suggested, the proclitic construction surfaces not only in colloquial registers but also in Academic Russian. In this paper, the frequency and usage of such constructions are examined based on data from a web corpus, Internet articles and the search engine Google scholar. Several factors related to syntax, cognitive processing and semantics are found to interplay in the gradual merging of the two elements of друг друга, sometimes leading to a loss of endoclisis. The results are discussed in the light of grammaticalization processes of bipartite reciprocal pronouns in other languages