Virtually conceptually necessary

[Rui Chaves]

Hi Stefan,
it is clear to me that there is nothing going on in syntax, contra Postal.
McCawley (1968), Stockwell et al. (1973), Pullum & Gazdar (1982), Kay
(1989), inter alia have noted examples like the following:

(1) Those five men are Polish, Irish, Armenian, Italian, and Chinese,
respectively.
(2) The following two sections will deal with these two issues respectively.
(3) I submitted these two papers to these two journals, respectively.
(4) These two contestants sing and dance, respectively.

Gawron and Kehler. 2004 'The semantics of respectively readings', L&P
deal with these data. Their account boils down to distributing pieces
of semantic representations in the semantics,
*in the presence of plurality*, rather than in syntax.

However, in my dissertation (subsubsection 4.2.2, page 126
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~rchaves/dissertation.html) I noted
counterexamples that show that 'respectively' readings need not
involve plurality or conjunction:


(a) Each boy kissed his girlfriend, respectively.
(b). Every student was assigned to one tutor, respectively.

Or more natural examples:

(c) The values were greater than 98, 83 and 87 for each sample, respectively.
(d) It is essential that an agreement be reached as to the costs that
each party will respectively bear.
(e) The individual facets of the active mirror are positioned so that
each facet will respectively reflect a single light beam.
(f) A symposium and a board meeting are held once every month respectively.

I have worked out an account of the above, and presented it at the
2009 LSA, San Francisco. Hopefully I will in the near future have a
paper submission.

Best,
Rui