Reciprocal equatives

Abstract

A sentence like John and Mary are equally heavy conveys that John and Mary are as heavy as each other and can be characterized as a reciprocal equative. This paper discusses reciprocal equatives and inequatives in German. It explores the construction as novel source of evidence concerning the scopal properties of degree quantification. Specifically, reciprocal equatives are argued to provide evidence for the view that degree operators can take inverse scope over modal operators and can take scope outside DPs containing them at the surface (Heim 1999, 2001).