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).

Birner (1998) analyzes the construction of inversion within the centering theory, claiming that the preposed constituent in the inversion structure represents the backward-looking center that connects the current utterance to the previous discourse. However, this paper refutes such a strong claim, pointing out various problems of her work. Instead, this paper argues that the preposed element in the inversion construction is merely the preferred center under the condition that the ranking of the forward-looking centers is determined by the surface word order, rather than by grammatical relations. Thus, this paper claims that the discourse function of the construction of inversion is not text development but merely prominence-giving, in the sense of Ili$\acute{c}$ (1998).

Some sentential adverbials in English, especially those which introduce evidentiality (hereafter evidential adverbials), such as apparently, purportedly, reportedly, and allegedly, exhibit what we call 'the perspective shift' in interrogatives: they are interpreted from the speaker's perspective in declaratives, but are interpreted from the addressee's perspective in interrogatives. To account for this phenomenon, we argue that English evidential adverbials are functions taking a proposition as its argument and returns a character in the sense of Kaplan (1989). We further show that, with this assumption, the perspective shift of evidential adverbials in interrogatives can be explained within the rather standard semantics of interrogatives (Hamblin 1973, among others) and of indexicals (Kaplan 1989).