Reciprocals Distribute over Information States

Abstract

Reciprocal sentences require distributivity for the correct interpretation. In the semantic literature on reciprocals, it is standard to assume that distributivity spans almost everything in reciprocal clauses, including not only reciprocals but also predicates and their arguments. In contrast to this tradition, I argue that nothing but reciprocals themselves should be interpreted distributively. Such a semantics of reciprocal clauses can be accommodated in dynamic frameworks which can store and retrieve dependencies between pluralities, modeled as plural information states, i.e., sets of variable assignments (van den Berg 1996; Nouwen 2003; Brasoveanu 2007; among others). I argue that a reciprocal distributes over nothing else but a plural information state, and I provide compositional interpretation of reciprocity using Plural Compositional Discourse Representation Theory (the extension of Compositional Discourse Representation Theory of Muskens 1996 by Brasoveanu 2007, 2008).

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