Title
The others versus each other

Øystein Nilsen & Jakub Dotlacil

CASTL colloquium

Date:  29.11.2007

Time:  19:15

Venue:  E010 1

Description
Reciprocals notoriously allow for a range of different readings in different grammatical and pragmatic contexts, making them a real challenge for theories of the syntax-semantics interface. Two main strategies can be discerned in the theoretical literature on the topic. Strategy I) After Langendoen (1978), several proposals strive to reduce semantic variability of RS to the variety of readings observed in sentences with plural arguments, viz. collective, distributive, cumulative, dependent, and other construals. On these proposals, 'each other' is taken to be an anaphoric plural DP (Beck 2001). Strategy II) After Dalrymple et al. (1998), other proposals seek to reduce such semantic variability to interlocutors' world knowledge about possible denotations for the transitive verb relation $R$ (Sabato and Winter, 2005). In reciprocal senteces, $R$ is then treated as an argument of the reciprocal itself, thus relating reciprocity to arity reduction operations.

By systematically comparing the syntactic and semantic properties of 'each other' to the expression 'the others,' we argue that Strategy I) above can't be the right approach to reciprocals, since it applies much more straightforwardly to 'the others,' providing, in fact, a rather elegant account of how this expression differs from reciprocals. Hence, Strategy II) is the only remaining approach to reciprocity, Strategy I being reserved for 'the others.'