Coppock/Hill/Myler present on Indonesian reciprocals at LSA

A poster entitled “Voice-mismatch reciprocals in Indonesian and binary predicate conjunction” by Elizabeth Coppock, Romi Hill and Neil Myler will be presented at the LSA Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA, January 2026.

Abstract:

Our paper focuses on a phenomenon in Indonesian we call voice-mismatch reciprocals. For example, Ani dan Ani jimpit-men-jimpit means `Ani and Ana pinched each other’. This construction may appear at first to be one of Indonesian’s many reduplication constructions, as Mistica et al. (2009) argue. We argue instead that this construction involves coordination, in agreement with Udayana et al. (2024). We argue in particular that it is binary predicates that are coordinated, in the manner that Staroverov (2007) envisions for syndetic coordination of relational nouns, as in brother and sister. We show that the binary coordination analysis offers a principled route to the reciprocal reading, relying only on general mechanisms, one which is compatible with the argument-selection behavior of the verbs involved.