Symmetric Paths: Their Structures and Relations

The goal of this paper is two-fold: (i) the paper aims to characterize unique semantics of so called "symmetric" locatives like across the street - this will provide a guiding semantics for annotating a variety of paths; and (ii) the paper claims that we need "symmetric" paths to give a unified account of the various semantic effects of symmetric locatives. The paper illustrates several semantic effects induced by symmetric locatives: (i) symmetric underspecification, (ii) path-/event-quantification, (iii) static symmetric relations, and (iv) the symmetric inference by the adverb back. The paper defines the semantic class of symmetric locatives, and accounts for the symmetry effects in terms of properties and relations of Path Structure proposed by Nam (1995).