Sentence-internal different and lexical reciprocity

Abstract

This paper draws a link between one type of sentence-internal readings of adjectives like different – here called the plural-dependent reading – and lexical reciprocity. The plural-dependent reading is most often discussed as a reading of different and same (e.g. Carlson 1987; Beck 2000; Brasoveanu 2011). I show that it is generally available with, and crucially limited to, lexically-reciprocal adjectives. I next show that plural-dependent readings behave like collective uses of lexically-reciprocal adjectives, in contrast to periphrastic and transitive uses of the same adjectives. Unlike periphrastic constructions, both plural-dependent readings and collective uses allow a lexical mass noun as an argument. Unlike transitive uses, both plural-dependent readings and collective uses force an interpretation which cannot be reduced to binary relations. These data indicate that plural-dependent readings don’t contain covert reciprocal pronouns (contra Beck 2000; Charnavel 2015), and are not conjunctions of binary relations (contra Brasoveanu 2011). I propose to analyze plural-dependent readings in terms of semantically basic, collective predication (Winter 2018).

Keywords

• sentence-internal readings
• reciprocity
• different
• mass nouns