On September 19, Troy Messick gave a talk at Princeton University, titled “The Mechanics of Reciprocal Shift.”
There he presented his ongoing work on the structure of complex reciprocals cross-linguistically. This includes languages where the complex reciprocal can be split apart by both adpositions in PPs and possessums in possessive structures. This word order is also strongly correlated with case agreement between a part of the reciprocal and its antecedent.
Troy presented a movement analysis of part of the reciprocal and coupled that with a syntactic case transmission mechanism. This analysis has consequences for the domain of agreement operations, linearization, and the binding of reflexive anaphors and reciprocals inside PPs and DPs.