Florian Haas

Reciprocity in English : historical development and synchronic structure

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Reciprocity in English: An Overview of the Facts and Previous Research 3. Historical Development 4. Intransitive Verbs Expressing Reciprocity 5. Reciprocity in English: A Comprehensive Perspective Primary Sources and Corpora Notes Bibliography Index

Symmetric verbs and constraints on passivization: An English-German comparison

Abstract Constraints on passivization have mainly been formulated in terms of semantic properties of verbs and their arguments. Comparative data from English and German suggest that at least in some areas of the lexicon other factors are at work as well. Dif-ferent uses of the English verb meet have been investigated with respect to their occur-rence in the active and passive diatheses. It turns out that there are striking differences between these uses, for some (near) categorical and for others in terms of frequency. A comparison to their German counterparts, each realized as a formally distinct lexeme and each conforming to the general frequency distribution of actives and passives in German, reveals that semantic and pragmatic motivations cannot sufficiently account for the distribution in English. I propose that verb senses and voice values are associated in such a way that semantic ambiguities are minimized.

The morphosyntactic status of the Greek bipartite reciprocal in cross-linguistic perspective

The Greek reciprocal expression o énas ton álon represents an interesting transitional stage in the development from a transparent spelling out of the reciprocal relation to a lexicalized reciprocal expression filling an argument position of transitive verbs. This is indicated by a number of morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the expression. The corresponding expressions in other languages undergo the same changes. We point at shared properties of the Greek reciprocal and its English, Spanish and Basque counterparts.