Typicality Effects and the Logic of Reciprocity
Venue
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2009), pp. 257-274
Publication Year
2009
Authors
Nir Kerem, Naama Friedmann, Yoad Winter
BibTeX
Abstract
The variability in the interpretation of reciprocal expressions has been
extensively addressed in the literature and received detailed semantic accounts.
After pointing out a central empirical limitation of previous logical accounts of
reciprocity, we argue that these approaches suffer from inadequacies due to
ignoring typicality preferences with binary predicate concepts. We claim that
typicality preferences are crucial for interpreting reciprocals and introduce a new
principle, the Maximal Typicality Hypothesis (MTH), which analyzes reciprocals
using an extension of the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH) proposed in Dalrymple
et al. (1998) Unlike the SMH, which is a principle that implicitly presupposes a
classical two-valued (“definitional”) treatment of predicate concepts, the MTH
respects the fuzziness of such concepts as manifested by their typicality
preferences, and expects strong correlations between these preferences and the
range of logical interpretations available for reciprocal expressions. The expected
correlations are supported by new empirical results elicited in a series of
experiments with speakers of Hebrew.
