The others, each other, and the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis

1. Sentences containing reciprocals (henceforth reciprocal sentences, RS) notoriously allow a plethora of different readings in different contexts (Fiengo and Lasnik, 1973; Langendoen, 1978; Dalrymple et al., 1998, a.o.). Two distinct theoretical strategies have been pursued in response to that conundrum. S1) After Langendoen (1978), several proposals strive to reduce semantic variability of RS to the variety of readings observed in sentences with plural arguments, viz. collective, distributive, cumulative and other construals. On these proposals, each other is taken to be an anaphoric plural DP. S2) After Dalrymple et al. (1998), other proposals seek to reduce such semantic variability to interlocutors’ world knowledge about possible denotations for the transitive verb relation R (Sabato and Winter, 2005) with a reciprocal being a polyadic quantifier taking R as an argument. We argue that S1 should be abandoned in the domain of reciprocals, but that it leads to an elegant account for the others. We argue for a version of S2 for reciprocals where the effects of the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH, Dalrymple et al.) is derived by anti-exhaustivity as used in the domain of Free choice Items by e.g. Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002); Chierchia (2006). The others on its bound construal (henceforth the others bound, TOB) can sometimes be substituted for each other without forcing a change in meaning (1), though this is not always possible (2). The latter example shows that the antecedent of the reciprocal can be a group argument of a collective predicate, while this is impossible for antecedents of TOB. To facilitate bound construals of the others, all sentences in this abstract should be interpreted in the context of three sailors, John, Bill, and Jack, who are stranded on a deserted island. (1) The sailors are all jealous of each other. = The sailors are all jealous of the others.