LingLunch : Yoad Winter

Abstract. Understanding Partial Reciprocity (Yoad Winter/Utrecht University / IJN)

Reciprocal pronouns (‘each other’) and reciprocal verbs (‘meet’, ‘hug’) allow non-maximal interpretations: both ‘the men fought’ and ‘the men fought each other’ can describe a barroom brawl where some men do not fight others. This talk connects non-maximal reciprocity to other cases of interpretative ‘slack’, especially plural definites (Križ & Spector 2020). Experimental findings show that while both intransitive and pronominal reciprocals allow non-maximality, intransitives are more tolerant towards exceptions, and are more influenced by agents’ intentions. Lexical theories of intransitives better explain these differences than quantifier-based approaches. Following Lasersohn’s (1999) view of slack quantification, we argue that pronominal reciprocals inherit ‘pragmatic halos’ from covert distributivity operators (Beck 2001), while intransitives derive their halos from slack relations with transitives, similarly to other lexicon-based semantic relations. Time permitting, I'll discuss the more general issues surrounding "strongest meaning" effects and homogeneity with reciprocals.