[PLing] Reminder: Talk by Prof. Idan Landau, 17 April, 18:30h

[Iva Kovač]

Dear PLing-members,

This is to remind you that Prof. Idan Landau (Ben-Gurion University) 
will be giving a talk this upcoming Monday (17 April), as part of his 
visit to the FWF project Implicational hierarchies in clausal 
complementation (PI Susi Wurmbrand) and the Department of Linguistics.

The talk will take place at 18:30h in Hörsaal 1 (Sensengasse 3A, 1st 
floor), and you can find the title and the abstract below.

I hope to see many of you there!

Iva Kovač

***

_Reciprocal Shift and Symmetry Breaking_

Bipartite reciprocal phrases are common in Indo-European, Indo-Aryan and 
Semitic languages. When occurring with a case particle (K) or a 
preposition (P), K/P intervenes between the two units of the reciprocal 
phrase, producing an otherwise exceptional K/P-medial KP/PP. While 
diachronic descriptions successfully trace the origin of the two units 
to separate constituents which have gradually gotten closer, they fall 
short of explaining the stability of the K/P-medial outcome. Based on a 
detailed study of the Hebrew reciprocal construction, I argue that its 
two components are generated as sisters but cannot persist as such 
because they yield an illicit point of symmetry - an unlabeled phrase. 
The first member thus raises past K/P, breaking the symmetry, thereby 
allowing the complement of K/P to be labeled. The analysis is supported 
by data from intra- and crosslinguistic variation and predicts 
systematic correlations between the degree of symmetry between the two 
units of the reciprocal phrase and their separability.
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