In this presentation, I support the claim that reciprocity is a composite notion, which consists of (i) the distributivity component, (ii) the anaphoricity component and (iii) the disjointness component.
I show that a distributor “sorezore” in Japanese induces a reciprocal reading when the configuration between “sorezore” and its antecedent violates the binding condition B. Adopting the plural dynamic framework, I propose that the co-reference condition of “sorezore” is collectively evaluated, but its scope domain is distributively evaluated under the dynamic distributive operator δ (van den berg 1996, Nouwen 2007, Brasoveanu 2007). As a result, “sorezore” and its antecedent are co-referential at the level of plural individuals, but disjoint at the level of atomic individuals, deriving a reciprocal reading.
I further investigate two other reciprocal strategies in Japanese, namely “otagai” and “-au.” I propose that “otagai” has a similar semantics as “sorezore,” whereas “-au” is just a pluractional verbal suffix. Thus, “otagai” and “sorezore” lexicalises the distributive component and the anaphoric component, whereas “-au” lexicalises only the distributive component. This type of variation can be found in other languages, too. For example, Brazilian Portuguese has scattered reciprocals: “o outro” (the other) under the scope of an anaphoric distributor “um” expresses reciprocity (Kobayashi 2020) and Cuzco Quechua expresses reciprocity with a pluractional suffix “-na”, a reflexive suffix “-ku” and Condition B (Faller 2007).
All in all, these suggest that the three components of reciprocity are not always lexicalised as a single item, but these are sometimes distributed to the lexical semantics and the syntax-semantics interface.