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Publ 107346 Issue CH05 Page Squibs and Discussion SYMMETRIC RECIPROCAL 1 Introduction SEMANTICS AS A PREDICTOR Wilkinson (1971) and Lawler (1972) originally observed the phenome- OF PARTIAL CONTROL non of partial control (PC). Descriptively, PC refers to situations in J.-Marc Authier which the reference of PRO must include that of an overt argument The Pennsylvania State in the matrix clause, but is not exhaustively determined by that argu- University ment. The effects of PC are best observed in sentences like (1a), which Lisa Reed contain an infinitival whose predicate is unambiguously collective (i.e., The Pennsylvania State one that requires, rather than just allows, its subject to denote a plural University entity; cf. (1b)). to kiss םto meet at 6:00/PROj םa. Clairej wanted [PROj (1) in the kitchen]. b. The lovers/*Claire met/kissed in the kitchen. Most of the research on PC has focused on the (semantic) properties of those matrix predicates that license the phenomenon (see, e.g., Landau 2000, White and Grano 2013 for a survey and experimental data, as well as Pearson 2016). One notable exception to this trend is provided by Sheehan (2012, 2014), who observes that PC in European Portu- guese, Italian, Spanish, and French displays a selective availability based on what kind of collective predicate appears in the embedded infinitival containing PRO.1 Specifically, she points out that the de- scriptive generalization in (2) seems to hold. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions made by Benjamin Bruening, Idan Landau, Tal Siloni, Dominique Sportiche, the LI reviewers, the Squibs and Discussion editors, and the audiences at the 41st Penn Linguistics Colloquium and the 47th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages hosted by the University of Delaware. We also wish to thank our informants: Nigel Duffield and Ian Roberts for (British) English and Simon Cottart, Morgane Haesen, Johann LeGuelte, Marie Paillard, and Timothe´e Va- lentin for French. All remaining errors are, naturally enough, our sole responsi- bility. 1 Landau (2000:86) was the first to notice this selective availability in French but erroneously assumed that while PC was generally available in French, it was impossible with any of the collective se-predicates. He also noted that his theory of control did not offer a satisfactory explanation for the latter fact. Linguistic Inquiry, Volume 49, Number 2, Spring 2018 379–393 ᭧ 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi: 10.1162/ling_a_00276 379 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LING_a_00276 by guest on 23 September 2021 380 SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION (2) PC readings arise in Romance only with those embedded collective predicates that can take an overt comitative argu- ment. Thus, French se re´unir ‘meet/gather’ can take an overt comitative argument but s’embrasser ‘kiss/hug’ cannot, and, as a result, only the former can occur in a PC infinitival.2 (3) a. Eric s’est re´uni avec ses amis. Eric SE-is met with his friends ‘Eric met with his friends.’ .[se re´unir dans la cuisine םb. Ericj voulait [PROj Eric wanted SE meet in the kitchen ‘Eric wanted to meet in the kitchen.’ (4) a. *Eric s’est embrasse´ avec Nadine. Eric SE-is kissed with Nadine ‘*Eric kissed with Nadine.’ .[s’embrasser dans la cuisine םb. *Ericj voulait [PROj Eric wanted SE-kiss in the kitchen ‘Eric wanted to kiss in the kitchen.’ Since the generalization in (2) does not seem to apply to English (see the English glosses in (4)), Sheehan calls examples like (3b) instances of ‘‘fake PC’’ and argues that this distinct phenomenon arises indi- rectly from a silent comitative phrase present in the infinitival comple- ment (as Hornstein (2003) and others have proposed is the case in all languages). Landau (2016a) convincingly shows, however, that Sheehan’s analysis of PC in Romance is untenable by pointing out that elements syntactically and/or semantically associated with overt comitatives are systematically unavailable with PC complements. For example, while an adverb like se´pare´ment ‘separately’ can modify an overt comitative (5a), it fails to occur in those PC complements alleged to have a null comitative structure (5b). (5) a. Le Pre´sident a dit a` ses homologues des E-U the president has said to his counterparts of.the US et de la Russie qu’il pre´fe´rait se re´unir avec and of the Russia that-he preferred SE meet with eux se´pare´ment. them separately ‘The president told his US and Russian counterparts that he preferred to meet with them separately.’ 2 Note that (4b) is grammatical on an exhaustive obligatory control read- ing, with se taking on a reflexive meaning paraphrasable in English as ‘Eric wanted to kiss himself in the kitchen’. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LING_a_00276 by guest on 23 September 2021 SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION 381 b. Le Pre´sident a dit a` ses homologues des E-U the president has said to his counterparts of.the US et de la Russie qu’il pre´fe´rait se re´unir and of the Russia that-he preferred SE meet (*se´pare´ment) avant Noe¨l. (separately) before Christmas ‘The president told his US and Russian counterparts that he preferred to meet (*separately) before Christmas.’ We add to Landau’s arguments one of our own, one that is based on the observation, due to Dimitriadis (2004), that the semantics of simple reciprocals enriched with a comitative phrase (also called discontin- uous reciprocals) is more specific (or expressive) than that of their corresponding simple reciprocals. Consider in this respect the para- digm in (6). (6) a. Eric, Nadine, et quelqu’un d’autre se sont dispute´s. Eric Nadine and someone else SE are argued ‘Eric, Nadine, and someone else argued.’ b. Eric et Nadine se sont dispute´s avec quelqu’un Eric and Nadine SE are argued with someone d’autre. else ‘Eric and Nadine argued with someone else.’ As Dimitriadis points out, a sentence like (6a) describes a quarreling event involving Eric, Nadine, and someone else with no specification as to who was in conflict with whom. The interpretation of the discon- tinuous reciprocal construction in (6b), on the other hand, is more specific in that it expresses a reciprocal relation between pairs consist- ing of one participant (possibly plural) taken from the denotation of the subject and another participant taken from the denotation of the comitative phrase. Thus, (6b) is either about a disagreement involving Eric and Nadine versus someone else, or about two separate conflicts, one involving Eric versus someone else and another involving Nadine versus that someone else. Consider next the sentence in (7) on the PC reading symbolized by the indices. s’eˆtre םEric et Nadine]j se rappellent [PROj] (7) Eric and Nadine SE remember SE-to.be dispute´s]. argued ‘Eric and Nadine remember arguing.’ On the assumption that (7) contains a null comitative phrase, we expect the interpretation of that sentence to be akin to that of (6b) in that it should involve pairs whose first member corresponds to the denotation of the controller (i.e., Eric and Nadine) and whose second member corresponds to the denotation of the null comitative. This expectation is not fulfilled, however. Indeed, the PC reading associated with (7) can only be paraphrased as follows: Eric and Nadine remember that there was a quarreling event involving Eric, Nadine, and some other Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LING_a_00276 by guest on 23 September 2021 382 SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION unspecified individual(s) with no specification as to who was in conflict with whom. The fact that (7) cannot have the more specific reading tied to the presence of an overt comitative phrase in (6b) thus provides an additional argument against the presence of a null comitative in PC contexts. Landau’s (2016a,b) analysis of PC, which does not posit a null comitative phrase but takes PRO in PC to be a group-denoting, syntac- tically singular but semantically plural noun, is not (directly) chal- lenged by the facts in (5) and (7). However, given the untenable charac- ter of Sheehan’s analysis of Romance ‘‘fake PC’’ demonstrated above, neither Landau’s account of PC nor its alternatives can explain why the selective availability of PC exhibited by Romance embedded predi- cates is not also present in English (see, e.g., (4b) vs. (1a)). In this squib, we will claim that (a) there is no such thing as ‘‘fake PC’’; that is, there is only one kind of PC, and this phenomenon is subject to the same conditions in English as it is in Romance; (b) one such condition is that the embedded collective predicate have (irreducibly) symmetric reciprocal semantics in the sense of Siloni (2002, 2012) and Dimitriadis (2004, 2008); and (c) the difference between English and Romance boils down to the facts that only recip- rocals formed in the lexicon introduce symmetric semantics and that the set of reciprocals formed in the lexicon in English and that formed in the lexicon in Romance are not identical. The assumption that recip- rocal verbs can be formed in different components of the gram- mar—namely, the lexicon and the syntax—is based on a coherent cluster of distinctive properties (such as degree of productivity) first uncovered by Siloni (2001) and further substantiated by Reinhart and Siloni (2005), who capture the split via a Lex(icon)-Syn(tax) parame- ter. This parameter states that Universal Grammar allows valence- changing operations to apply either in the lexicon or in the syntax. Following Siloni (2002), we will argue that only lexical reciprocals are symmetric and that French, being a language with a syntactic setting of the Lex-Syn parameter, only has isolated instances of lexical reciprocal verbs.
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