[PLing] Talk by Prof. Idan Landau, 17 April, 18:30h
Iva Kovač
iva.kovac at univie.ac.at
Tue Mar 21 07:54:46 CET 2023
Dear PLing-members,
We are delighted to announce a talk by Prof. Idan Landau (Ben-Gurion
University) entitled _Reciprocal Shift and Symmetry Breaking_ (see below
for the abstract), which will take place on Monday, 17 April 2023, at
18:30h, in Hörsaal 1 (Sensengasse 3A).
We look forward to seeing many of you there!
Kind regards,
Iva Kovač & Susi Wurmbrand
***
_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.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/pling/attachments/20230321/f7a6036d/attachment.html>
More information about the PLing
mailing list