The Semantics of Reciprocity

About

The proposed course will provide an overview of reciprocity from logical and (cross-)linguistic perspectives. After a short introduction to the formal semantics of plurals, the first part of the course will analyze meanings of reciprocal quantifiers (‘each other’). We will address their cross-linguistic relations with distributivity and collectivity, anaphora and reflexivity, and analyze pragmatic and lexical effects on their selection. The second part of the course will discuss reciprocal predicates (‘meet’, ‘hug’, ‘friend’), their logical effects on symmetry of n-ary relational meanings, and conceptual interactions with events and thematic roles. Overall, the proposed course will serve as an up-to-date example of the heterogeneity of formal semantics, illustrating its development from a subfield of philosophical logic to an interdisciplinary domain in linguistics that also engages with syntactic theory, lexical and typological analysis, and psycholinguistics.

Course leader

Yoad Winter

Target group

Students

Fee info