You Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Yours: Reflexives and Reciprocals in Italian

My sons have grown up in Italy but are completely bilingual in English (ahem, American English, that is) and Italian. When they were younger, this process of sorting and organizing the alphabet soup of languages in their heads led to some very funny bilingual-specific “spoonerisms”, as I liked to call them. Things like "Smell this shirt, it’s so soft!" or “The thing about Lost is that at the end of every episode it leaves you on the spines.”

Those “close-but-no-cigar” mas