One of the insights of
dynamic semantics in its various guises (Kamp 1981,
Heim 1982, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991, Kamp & Reyle
1993 among many others) is that interpretation is
sensitive to left-to-right order. Is order
sensitivity, particularly the default left-to-right
order of evaluation, a property of particular meanings
of certain lexical items (e.g., dynamically
interpreted conjunction) or is it a more general
feature of meaning composition? If it is a more
general feature of meaning composition, is it a
processing ‘preference’ or should it be captured as a
‘harder’ constraint on the type of meanings and
operations over meanings involved in natural language
interpretation? This squib draws attention to the
symmetrical A-too B-too construction (found in a
variety of languages, e.g., Hungarian, Japanese,
Romanian, Russian) in this context. It argues that any
semantic analysis of its main ‘symmetrical-meaning’
characteristic should also allow for subtler
interactions between this construction and items that
are clearly sensitive to evaluation-order effects,
e.g., anaphoric adjectives like next and other. We
suggest that the notion of postsupposition embedded in
a broader dynamic framework is better able to account
for both the symmetric nature of this construction,
its non-symmetric variant A-too, and its interaction
with items that are evaluation-order sensitive. We
briefly compare this proposal with a couple of
possible alternative accounts.
