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<p>Dear PLing-members,<br /><br />This is to remind you that Prof. Idan Landau (Ben-Gurion University) will be giving a talk this upcoming <strong>Monday (17 April)</strong>, as part of his visit to the FWF project Implicational hierarchies in clausal complementation (PI Susi Wurmbrand) and the Department of Linguistics.<br /><br />The talk will take place at <strong>18:30h</strong> in <strong>Hörsaal 1</strong> (Sensengasse 3A, 1st floor), and you can find the title and the abstract below.<br /><br />I hope to see many of you there!<br /><br />Iva Kovač<br /><br />***<br /><br /><em>Reciprocal Shift and Symmetry Breaking</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
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