RECIPROCALS, LEXICAL SEMANTICS OF PREDICATES AND THE STRONGEST MEANING HYPOTHESIS

Yoad Winter
Technion

Monday, November 29, 12PM MJH Rm 126

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Program


Consider the semantic contrast between the following sentences.

(1) Mary, Sue and Jane saw each other yesterday at 8pm.
(2) Mary, Sue and Jane stood on each other yesterday at 8pm.

Sentence (1) entails that each of the three women saw each of the other two. By contrast, (2) obviously does not entail that each of them stood on each of the other ones.

The Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH), proposed by Dalrymple et al. (1994,1998), uses restrictions on the meanings of transitive predicates to select the logically strongest operator, from a postulated array of operators, that is consistent with these restrictions. In (1) and (2), for instance, the strongest meaning of the reciprocal in Dalrymple et al.'s theory that is consistent with the semantic properties of "see" is different than the strongest meaning that is consistent with those of "stand on", hence the contrast (1)-(2).

In this talk, I will argue for an implementation of the SMH as a principle for *deriving* reciprocal meanings, rather than selecting from a given array of postulated meanings. I will show how this modification of Dalrymple et al.'s SMH leads to new empirical predictions in the following domains:

    - The derivation of weaker readings than expected by Dalrymple et al.'s SMH, as in "the pirates are staring at each other".

    - The interplay between reciprocity and Schwarzschild-style partitioning effects with plurals.

    - The hypotheses that the revised SMH reveals about lexically (im)possible meanings of transitive predicates, and logically (im)possible meanings of reciprocals.

    - Comparisons with other implementations of the SMH: Gardent and Konrad 2000, Winter 2001.

Selected References

M. Dalrymple, M. Kanazawa, S. Mchombo, and S. Peters (1994), "What do reciprocals mean?", SALT4.
M. Dalrymple, M. Kanazawa, Y. Kim, S. Mchombo and S. Peters (1998), "Reciprocal expressions and the concept of reciprocity", Linguistics and Philosophy 21:159-210.
C. Gardent and K. Konrad (2000), "Understanding Each Other", NAACL1. R.
Schwarzschild (1996), Pluralities, Kluwer. Y. Winter (2001), "Plural predication and the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis", Journal of Semantics 18:333-365.











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