E-Raising Reconsidered: Constituency, Coordination and Case-Matching Reciprocals

Abstract

In Icelandic, part of the complex reciprocal hvor annar matches in case with the reciprocal’s antecedent. In structures where the reciprocal is embedded in a PP, the P intervenes between the two parts. A recent analysis of these data suggests that part of the reciprocal overtly moves to the base position of the antecedent by an operation termed e-raising. We show that such an analysis makes a number of wrong predictions about the constituencies of such structures and also about the behavior of reciprocals in coordinations. We show that this is also the case for other languages that show case-agreeing reciprocals. We instead argue that matching in case between antecedent and reciprocal can occur with the reciprocal staying in situ. Instances with PPs do involve movement but only to the edge of PP and not further. This analysis is in line with a number of recent approaches that advocate for a morphosyntactic feature matching relation between antecedent and locally bound anaphors.