The next talk in our 2025-2026 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Yoad Winter (Utrecht University) on Friday, October 10th at 3:30pm at Leacock 15. The details of the talk are given below.
Title: Reciprocal Alternations: Operators vs. Lexical Preferences
Abstract: One approach to verbs like ‘meet’, ‘hug’ and ‘fight’ derives their intransitive, “reciprocal”, meaning from the transitive entry, using a logical rule or a deleted reciprocal pronoun (‘each other’). Another approach interprets reciprocal meanings of verbs as lexicon-based, relating the meanings of the verb’s different sub-categorizations using “softer”, preferential principles, as found in other areas of the lexicon. Similar dichotomies between logical/derivational approaches and preferential approaches arise with other verb alternations (Dowty 1991). This talk addresses the systematic differences between reciprocal pronouns (‘each other’) and reciprocal verbs, especially in relation to 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. We link non-maximal reciprocity to other instances of interpretative ‘slack’, especially plural definites (Križ & Spector 2020). Experimental findings show that while both intransitive and pronominal reciprocals allow for non-maximality, intransitives are more tolerant of exceptions and are more influenced by the agents’ intentions. Preferential theories better explain these differences than derivational or logical 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, in a manner similar to other lexicon-based semantic relations. These “slack” relations are also examined in relation to reciprocal ‘with’ constructions (‘A fought with B’). We show that the same principles we use to explain non-maximality in collective intransitive forms (‘A and B fought’) naturally extend to ‘with’ forms, as they involve assigning lexical weights of agency features to different argument positions.
(Joint work with Imke Kruitwagen, Giada Palmieri, James A. Hampton and Joost Zwarts)