Composing reciprocity: An analysis of scattered reciprocal

Abstract

Scattered reciprocals (SRs) are Brazilian Portuguese constructions built from two discontinuous phrases which can offer a new window into the issue of the building blocks of reciprocity. By investigating how reciprocity is compositionally built in sentences with SRs, a puzzle emerges: SRs can apparently take split scope around other quantifiers, but only if these quantifiers are pronounced in a position outside of the reciprocal's scope domain. I argue that these are only apparent cases of split scope and, building on Murray (2008) and Dotlačil (2012), I propose a decompositional account of reciprocals which is formalized in Champollion, Bledin & Li's (2017) Plural Predicate Logic, a static logic which makes use of sets of assignment functions to model plurals. The resulting analysis allows us to view SRs and reciprocal pronouns like each other as being built from the same pieces, with the only difference between them being in how they are syntactically built.