The Logic of Reciprocity Revisited

On the Interpretations of a Reciprocal Construction in Taiwanese

Abstract

In this paper, we study the semantic properties of a reciprocal construction in Taiwanese. We particularly focus on the real-world situations that this reciprocal construction may encode. In this study, we not only find that the types of predicates are closely related to the interpretations of the reciprocal and that the semantics of the reciprocal is cross-linguistically similar by comparison with studies of reciprocals in English, but also make some discoveries that have never been discussed before. In addition, we review the general schema of reciprocals proposed by Langendoen (1978) and show its inadequacies. Then, based on Oehrle's (to appear) Austinian pluralities, we propose a new schema to accommodate all types of reciprocal situations.